On Fri, 2002-10-04 at 15:23, Rick Matthews wrote:
> Ian Spare wrote:
> >
> > Unless you don't think that 5+1 is 6 then we can probably assume
> > it's true :-)
>
> I'm not a C programmer, but I do have a fair amount of programming and
> scripting experience. If the error is in fact, as straightforward as:
> length of file name + 4 ('.diff') + 1 (end marker), then I have
> trouble understanding:
>
> - How it has been in production for 3 years
> - How it made it through at least 6 revision cycles
> - How it has not been spotted by the thousands of eyeballs that have
> seen it
> - Why it only affects a literal handful of people
>
> The older, inferior languages that I have used would complain if you
> specifically asked for a 1 gallon bucket and then tried to put 2
> gallons of water in it. Or if they didn't complain, they would put
> 1 gallon in your bucket and throw away the other gallon. I guess
> it takes a new and improved language to ignore the defined structure
> and blindly corrupt surrounding memory.To paraphrase the popular saying, "C gives the programmer just enough rope to shoot himself in the foot" =] Having said that, I prefer people having to know how much memory they're using. Just imagine if, for example, Windows was written in a language that automatically made the bucket larger on demand! (no flames, please) Just my �0.02 Greg Sheard Technical Director ECSC Ltd. www.ecsc.co.uk Unable to locate Coffee -- Operator halted
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