On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:41:20 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: >> Part of the problem is C itself. > > And yet, what are these complicated garbage collectors, that you intend > relying on to work correctly with all their layers of tricks upon > tricks, written in? C.
Not necessarily. Pascal, despite the contempt it is held in by university computer science departments, isn't quite dead, and some Pascal compilers use garbage collectors written in Pascal. FreePascal, I believe, is one of them. Likewise for other not-dead-yet low-level languages like Ada and Forth. As surprising as it seems to many, C is not the only low-level language around suitable for writing high-quality, efficient code. Just ask the Lisp community, which is thriving. For some definition of thriving. Admittedly C has far more attention to it than the others, so [insert weasel words here] the best C compilers tend to produce more efficient code than the best of the others, but Pascal, Ada and similar give you more security than C. I believe that when computer scientists of the future look back at the last few decades, they will judge that on balance C did more harm than good. Not that C is the only language that people can write buggy or insecure code, but C does tend to give the bugs so much help... :) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
