problems/risks due to programming language, stories requested

Jason Coughlin jk0 at image.soe.clarkson.edu
Thu Mar 1 08:35:43 AEST 1990


>From article <6960 at internal.Apple.COM>, by chewy at apple.com (Paul Snively):
> For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that C lends itself to 
> precisely the kinds of errors noted above--when does break work and when 
> doesn't it, and why in God's name do you need it in switch statements in 
> the first place, etc.

	Gee, if you read the language defn you'd know exactly when break
applies and when break doesn't.  It seems to me that it is the
programmer's responsibility to know the language in which he is going to
implement said project -- it's not necessarily the language's responsibility
to know the programmer didn't read the defn.

> Well, I hate to say it, but it's extremely unlikely that such an error 
> would have been made in Pascal, since Pascal doesn't require you to 
> explicitly break from case...of constructs.

	And without knowing the project, you have no business making the
assertion that Pascal was better than C [especially on a Unix box] or
that C was better than Pascal [especially on a VMS box].
-- 
Jason Coughlin ( jk0 at sun.soe.clarkson.edu , jk0 at clutx )
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the
part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of." - They Might Be Giants



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