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

[James Devenish]

In message <3EC21C26.7050207 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Wed, May 14, 2003 at 06:36:22PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

> 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?

I wouldn't agree with that. Without delving into details about the
specifics of C or any other language, consider that many GUI toolkits
(or even particular daemons, like Apache) provide you with a runtime
library that insulates you almost completely from C's standard
libraries. Those libraries may contain nicely named, robust, efficient
and expanded versions of the standard C libraries, but I don't think
anyone is in any doubt that it's still C.

> 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.

FYI <http://www.openbsd.org> ;)