Fixing C's Biggest Mistake

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/29/22 21:38, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/28/2022 1:33 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 12/27/22 23:53, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> This is not a failure, it's a positive feature.
>>
>> To some extent. Aspects of this have been lovingly nicknamed the 
>> "billion dollar mistake".
> 
> I don't agree with that assessment at all. Having a seg fault when your 
> program enters an unanticipated, invalid state

The bad thing is allowing programs to enter unanticipated, invalid 
states in the first place...


> is a *good* thing. The 
> *actual* billion dollar mistake(s) in C are:
> 
> 1. uninitialized data leading to undefined behavior
> 
> 2. no way to do array buffer overflow detection
> 
> because those lead to malware and other silent disasters.
> ...

Not all disasters are silent. Maybe you are biased because you only 
write batch programs that are intended to implement a very precise spec.