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From: kaz@vision.crest.nt.com (Kaz Kylheku)
Subject: Re: Any research putting c above ada?
Date: 1997/05/01
Message-ID: <5kakqj$in3@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 238701189
References: <335F9D0E.41C67EA6@cacd.rockwell.com>
 <JSA.97Apr28190941@alexandria> <E9F3CF.2KK@research.att.com>
 <JSA.97Apr29212439@alexandria>
Organization: Prism Systems Inc.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-01T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <JSA.97Apr29212439@alexandria>,
Jon S Anthony <jsa@alexandria> wrote:
>In article <E9F3CF.2KK@research.att.com> ark@research.att.com (Andrew Koenig) writes:
>
>> In article <JSA.97Apr28190941@alexandria> jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) writes:
>> 
>> > Well, you rather miss the mark on this particular comment as at least
>> > two of the requirements in question ("readability, safety,") are not
>> > exactly specific to DoD.  Or do you think Bell Labs (or ATT) doesn't
>> > really care about either issue?  Actually, for all I know, maybe they
>> > don't and your comment is in fact spot on.
>> 
>> OK ... suppose you're in the DoD and you're in charge of setting
>
><and then goes on to state a bunch of completely irrelevant stuff>
>
>What in the world has this got to do with whether or not the two
>stated requirements ("readability" and "safety") are (or were)
>important to ATT/Bell Labs?  The point was that __Bell Labs__ stated
>that C could not meet these (and the other) requirements.
>
>> be drawn from the nonqualification of any existing language.
>
>Shrug.  Maybe, maybe not.  The original poster merely pointed out that
>Bell Labs were the ones who actively requested that C not even be
>considered as they (or at least whoever was tasked with the job of
>saying) felt that it could not possibly meet the requirements.

And they were right. If you consider the rather sad state of C in 1977.  At
that time it was only three years old. There was no standard to speak of which
would define the language and libraries.  Just think: the language didn't even
have a way to typecheck calls against definitions; prototypes were introduced
in C++ and migrated back into C. Error prone explicit casts had to be used in
function calls, for example:

foo(x)
long x;
{
    /* whatever */
}

bar()
{
    int x;
    foo((long) x);
}

Without the cast, the function call is incorrect. 

Some early C compilers also didn't put structure member names into separate
name spaces. Thus if you did:

    struct foo {
	int bar;
    } A;

    struct baz {
	int xyzzy;
    } B;

you could actually do ``A.xyzzy'' without a hitch.

Modern C is standardized, and offers better type checking. The addition
of function prototypes alone makes it a whole lot safer.