[plug] [link] Programming languages - and their faults

[Craig Ringer]

>>It's often used inappropriately.
> 
> That's not a flaw in C per se.

True. Unfortunately, "everything is written in C" and "everybody knows 
C" which tends to inflate the problem further. Not a problem with the 
language, but the language - at least its common usage - is becoming a 
problem. At least, the continuing upward trend in security problems 
would tend to support that, anyway.

>>what are the differences between execl, execlp, execle, execv, and 
>>execvp? If you're not using these every day, you'll be hitting man 3 
>>exec often.
> 
> The same could be said about any function or construct in any language.
> I don't use the multi-argument form of the print % syntax in Python
> every day, so I have to look it up every time I want to use it.

True enough. My understanding is that the lanuage "C" is absolutely 
tiny, and almost everything is provided by add-on functions in libc that 
have become essentially part of the language. A significantly 
re-designed libc would make C essentially a different language, yes?

Personally, I'd be happy if only people would use length-checking 
variants of string functions for everything - or at least unless they 
had a really good reason not to.