Bell Labs or Microsoft security?

Wed Jan 29 13:18:45 UTC 2003

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 03:32:41AM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> FORTRAN/COBOL array bounds checking.  Bell Labs answer: C. Who wants
> the computer to check array lengths or pointers.  Programmers know what
> they are doing, and don't need to be "constrained" by the programming
> language. Everyone knows programmers are better at arithmatic than
> computers.  A programmer would never make an off-by-one error. The
> standard C run-time library.  gets(char *buffer), strcpy(char *dest, char
> *src), what were they thinking?

Possibly that bounds checking is an incredible cpu suck, there are a great
many powerful things you can do in C based on the fact that there is no
bounds checking (pointers ARE your friend god damnit :P), and in a world
before buffer overflow exploits it probably didn't matter if Joe Idiot's
program crashed because he goofed? (hindsight is 20/20)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)