problems/risks ...

[Erland Sommarskog]

Robert Osborne (robert at isgtec.UUCP) writes:
>I'm tired of people blithly saying that "such and such is dangerous,
>and hence should be removed from the language" when I need such
>things to get interactive performance.  How many people posting to
>this group(s) are actually using C in a production environment?

Well, not me. I work in a production environment, but I fear of
the consequences of having the product I work with written in
C. We use VAX-Pascal, and that's bad enough.

We have severe performance problems in the system I involved with,
but I can tell you it's not because Pascal doesn't provide fall-
throughs on the CASE statement or have expensive function calls.
Those are simply not an issue. (This is a database application,
so our problems are connected with the disk I/O and locking.)

Working in a production does not only mean ultimate performance,
but also acceptable reliability and correctness. With a small
application you can maybe afford to have those traps around to
be able to gain some small percentage in execution time. (Which
not always is worth the bucks it costs your employer to pay you
doing it.) But when the size increases it becomes more and more
important to keep those traps out.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar at enea.se