"Expressive vs. permissive languages" and bugs

[Roman Ivanov]

I haven't worked with Ada, but I have worked with Ada-derived hardware
description language called VHDL and found it easier to use than than
C++. Maybe that's due to the ways I used the language. Maybe not. The
ability to define different integer types seemed nice. I like clarity.
(For example, I don't like that C# uses int for sizes, instead of uint.)
At the same time, I can easily see how that would get out of hand and
sabotage readability.

One of the issues mentioned in the articles always bothered me in C# and
Java. Why all the reference types are nullable by default? Most of the
time when an object is assigned a null value it is wrong and should
immediately generate an exception. I 5% of the cases when I want nulls,
I can ask for the explicitly.

On 10/23/2010 9:12 AM, bearophile wrote:
> I think I have not shown this article yet, "Expressive vs. permissive languages: Is that the question?" by Yannick Moy:
> 
> First page, with reader comments:
> 
> http://www.eetimes.com/design/eda-design/4008921/Expressive-vs-permissive-languages--Is-that-the-question-
> 
> Single page, without reader comments:
> 
> http://www.eetimes.com/General/DisplayPrintViewContent?contentItemId=4008921
> 
> 
> I think this article doesn't say particularly new things (and I think it's a bit biased toward Ada), but it says them in a nice and compact way, it discusses about a topic that interests D designers, because D is designed to avoid some of the typical bugs of C code.