Bell Labs or Microsoft security?
Alif The Terrible
measl at mfn.org
Wed Jan 29 14:27:19 UTC 2003
On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> 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)
I think the larger concern at that time was memory capacity. Remember that
only the very largest machines had over 128K.
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