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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
Date: 1996/03/15
Message-ID: <DoBIoL.1JC@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 142843395
references: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com>
 <4hf701INNdl7@keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> <4hm6lo$eln@fred.netinfo.com.au>
 <4hml8s$a1q@solutions.solon.com>
organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1996-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <4hml8s$a1q@solutions.solon.com>,
Peter Seebach <seebs@solutions.solon.com> wrote:
>Certainly.  A C implementation is free to be an interpreter that emulates
>every bit of every value and checks for arbitrary programming errors.
>
>There is no restriction that an implementation may not offer range checking,
>and many already do have stricter type checking than the standard requires.

But C doesn't have any syntax for defining the range of an int, except:

    int x; /* x is always between 1 and 10 */

So how can a C implementation check this range, without extending the
syntax of the language?  There are many other examples.

It is true that a C implementation can check array bounds without
extending the language.  But it's quite expensive at run time, because
of the confusion between pointers and arrays.

- Bob