Errors aren't that simple

[Peter da Silva]

In article <8192 at hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu at hubcap.clemson.edu writes:
> Many members of the C community exhibit an unprofessional and
> irresponsible attitude regarding defect control and especially
> defect prevention.   

Many members of the programming community as a whole exhibit an
unprofessional and irresponsible attitude regarding defect control
and expecially defect prevention. 

C happens to be the most popular language on a wide range of hardware,
by the chance that it happens to be well adapted to writing reasonably
portable and reasonably efficient programs, without being particularly
hard to implement or having particularly many functional shortfalls. Most
other system programming languages are either harder to implement (such
as ADA), do not fit well into the normal program linking model (such as
Modula), or are simply inadequate without nonstandard extensions (most
dialects of Pascal).

Thus, simply by statistics one could predict that a large number of
programs written in C are likely to contain major bugs. There are a
large number of programs written in C, period.

Would you care to address the confusing and dangerous deficiencies in
the ADA language: operator overloading and the use of rendezvous for
interprocess communication, for example? Have you read C. A. R. Hoare's
Turing Award lecture, "The Emperor's New Clothes"?
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