On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 04:23:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
1. Redundancy in specification means the compiler can catch
more 'typo' mistakes rather than having them compile
successfully and then behave mysteriously. If a language has 0
redundancy, then any 8745b48%%&*&hjdsfh string would be a valid
program. Redundancy is a critical feature of high reliability
languages.
Many languages have removed redundancy only to put it back in
after bitter experience. The classic is implicit declaration of
variables.
An example of this would be that Apple SSL bug that has largely
been blamed on optional curly braces for if statements with one
line in the body.
