-[ Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:22:46PM +0200, Andy Wingo ]---- > Much respect to the late Ritchie, but C is a dangerous language that has > negative impacts on the real world. We need to stop writing code that > launches the missiles (or, more likely, installs malicious keylogging > darknets) if your program has an out-of-bounds array write. Guile helps > people move from C to safe languages, at their own pace :)
Scheme is safer than C, because: - It has garbage collection, which solves many trivial memory management bugs; - A buggy program that performs an out-of-bound array access will crash at runtime, which is sometime better than to proceed. - It's much more portable than C, so that porting a program from its developer machine to another one is very unlikely to introduce a bug. C is safer than Scheme, because: - It has no automatic memory management, which avoids a few tricky memory leaks; - A buggy program that performs an out-of-bound array access may proceed with wrong data, which is sometime better than to crash at runtime; - It has a type checker ; if not state of the art, it still stops you from using the wrong type in runtime most of the time. I fail to see why Scheme is intrinsically safer than C, but as I just learnt the death of Denis Ritchie it might be that I'm emotionally biased, so to speak.
