problems/risks due to programming language

[Dave Jones]

>From article <2903 at goanna.oz.au>, by ok at goanna.oz.au (Richard O'keefe):
> There's been a lot of discussion about the "switch" statement.
> What people seem to have missed is that there are TWO debatable
> features about C's "break" statement, one of which was NOT
> present in C's grandfather BCPL.

I'll add a third one. Or maybe it's just a bug in the compiler I use.
I've been programing in C full time for about six years
now, so I don't make many mistakes, but I made this one the other day:

    enum bar { biff, bam, boom };

    proc()
    { enum bar foo;
       /* ... */
       switch(foo) {
       case biff:
          do_this();
          break;
       case bad:
          do_that();
          break;
       boom:
          do_the_other();
          break;
       }
     }

(The cases were separated by more lines of code.) The compiler loved
it. Sun's cc allows this if the enumeration is declared globally, but
not if it is declared within a block, if I remember correctly.

Of course, testing exposed the mistake, and a fellow whom I
asked to "look at this and see what I'm missing," looked at it
and saw what I was missing.