I remember an entire lecture about the use and abuse of sprintf and related functions as a means of exploit. Yeah, when you delve into the internals of C you f

I remember an entire lecture about the use and abuse of sprintf and related functions as a means of exploit. Yeah, when you delve into the internals of C you find things that are terrifying if you are concerned about reliability, security, or performance. The same is true though for many languages. The problem is, as is often the case, the Iron Triangle: good, fast, cheap - pick two. Different sections of the language are written by developers under different constraints and pressures, which leads to different choices. In my experience every language implementation has at least one area that was done quickly for expediency or done poorly because no one else was able to (or wanted to) work on it.