It has a lot of safety checks built into the runtime, which make it a little slower. x is and int between 1 and 200. x gets asigned out of that range, excepti

It has a lot of safety checks built into the runtime, which make it a little slower. x is and int between 1 and 200. x gets asigned out of that range, exception is thrown. So we weren't manually checking everything. Also I think it was mandated as a language for US government contracts, for a variety of reasons.