C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability

[William Thomas Wolfe, 2847]

>From goudreau at larrybud.rtp.dg.com (Bob Goudreau):
> an application whose quality of
> implementation was lowered *solely due to the choice of C as the
> programming language*.

    1) Unix.  (Example: the problem in which the double-length password
                        was used by an intruder to bypass security, taking
                        advantage of C's lack of boundary checking)

    2) AT&T's phone network (Example: recent crash, which was attributable 
                                      to C having switch/break instead of
                                      a safer case statement)

    Now practically all programming languages are Turing-complete, so
    anything which can be written correctly can theoretically be written
    in any of them.  However, some programming languages (e.g., C) are
    more likely to leave errors undetected than others.


   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe at hubcap.clemson.edu