Type safety could prevent nuclear war

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 04 Feb 2016 22:57:00 +0000, tsbockman wrote:

> The annual Underhanded C Contest announced their winners today.
> 
> As always, the results are very entertaining, and also an excellent
> advertisement for languages-that-are-not-C.
> 
> The first place entry is particularly ridiculous; is there any modern
> language that would make it so easy to commit such an awful "mistake"?
> 
> http://www.underhanded-c.org/#winner
> 
> Actually, I'm surprised that this works even in C - I would have
> expected at least a compiler (or linker?) warning; this seems like it
> should be easy to detect automatically.

C linkage does zero name mangling, which is the problem. C++ introduced 
name mangling, so compiling with g++ would show the error rather quickly. 
C99 is pretty close to C++98, but there are enough differences that that 
isn't a reliable diagnostic. (Though if you're familiar with the 
differences, you could use it as a quick way to show potential problem 
areas.)

I suppose a compiler could produce two symbol tables, one featuring 
mangled names and one with unmangled names. The linker would prefer 
matching mangled names and issue a warning if it only had an unmangled 
match with a mangled false match.