4 ms·

Delphi and pascal are memory safe? That's news to me. I have created my fair share of buffer overruns and memory corruption in both of them (they were my first

by pilif 11y ago

Delphi and pascal are memory safe? That's news to me. I have created my fair share of buffer overruns and memory corruption in both of them (they were my first languages I programmed in)

pjmlp 11y ago
Compared to C they are. You surely were using unsafe constructs explicitly, like taking the address of a variable wiht Addr or @, using pointer manipulation functions. With C they just happen, given the lack of bounds checking, implicit conversions, automatic decay of arrays into pointers (specially bad as arguments), null terminated strings and undefined behaviours across compilers.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  Alas, the Swiss version of Algol lost out to the New Jersey version :-( Bounds checking and non-nullable references are for wussies, after all. That, and a worse-is-better C compiler is easier to implement and thus more "available". (like Joel Spolsky said "Go ugly early")
  - jksmith 11y ago
    Haha wussy or not, damn did I get a lot of bullet proof shit done with M2. Now I have to work with the modern version of PL1. The more keywords the better the language, right?
    - Roboprog 11y ago
      Not sure how to interpret the "more keywords" comment. Words do have the advantage that they force people to put a space around them (usually), though, rather than jamming a bunch of operators together, "C/Unix Hoax" style. for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2); http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Joel didn't say that. You're probably thinking of this piece by Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... But I wouldn't exactly characterize that as advice Steve Yegge wants people to follow, either. > Back when I was in the Navy, just out of boot camp, an otherwise entirely forgettable petty officer first class instructor of ours offered us, unasked and free of charge, his sage advice on how to pick up women at a bar: "Go ugly early." With this declaration, he had made it clear that he and I thought rather differently about certain things in life. > If you want to spare yourself a lot of angst in deciding which programming language to use, then I recommend this simple rule: Go ugly early. C++ will go out with you in a heartbeat. > For my part, I want to encourage people to make their own languages
    - Roboprog 11y ago
      Oops. Right. "Worse/ugly is better" was meant as bitter sarcasm, though.

by pilif 11y ago

Delphi and pascal are memory safe? That's news to me. I have created my fair share of buffer overruns and memory corruption in both of them (they were my first languages I programmed in)

pjmlp 11y ago

Compared to C they are. You surely were using unsafe constructs explicitly, like taking the address of a variable wiht Addr or @, using pointer manipulation functions. With C they just happen, given the lack of bounds checking, implicit conversions, automatic decay of arrays into pointers (specially bad as arguments), null terminated strings and undefined behaviours across compilers.

Roboprog 11y ago
Alas, the Swiss version of Algol lost out to the New Jersey version :-( Bounds checking and non-nullable references are for wussies, after all. That, and a worse-is-better C compiler is easier to implement and thus more "available". (like Joel Spolsky said "Go ugly early")
- jksmith 11y ago
  Haha wussy or not, damn did I get a lot of bullet proof shit done with M2. Now I have to work with the modern version of PL1. The more keywords the better the language, right?
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    Not sure how to interpret the "more keywords" comment. Words do have the advantage that they force people to put a space around them (usually), though, rather than jamming a bunch of operators together, "C/Unix Hoax" style. for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2); http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Joel didn't say that. You're probably thinking of this piece by Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... But I wouldn't exactly characterize that as advice Steve Yegge wants people to follow, either. > Back when I was in the Navy, just out of boot camp, an otherwise entirely forgettable petty officer first class instructor of ours offered us, unasked and free of charge, his sage advice on how to pick up women at a bar: "Go ugly early." With this declaration, he had made it clear that he and I thought rather differently about certain things in life. > If you want to spare yourself a lot of angst in deciding which programming language to use, then I recommend this simple rule: Go ugly early. C++ will go out with you in a heartbeat. > For my part, I want to encourage people to make their own languages
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    Oops. Right. "Worse/ugly is better" was meant as bitter sarcasm, though.