Safety and power in languages

Security and safety in computers are a kind of negative power: by
allowing less, you know more about what a program will do, without
having to know or think as much about the program.


Norman H. Cohen <ncohen@watson.ibm.com> wrote:
|> When an Ada compiler rejects my source,
|> it is because compile-time consistency checks have caught me trying to
|> do something that does not make sense. I am grateful to have had the
|> mistake caught...


Daniel J. Salomon <salomon@silver.cs.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
>I would bet that a lot of the code that you wrote and was rejected by
>an Ada compiler was not that illogical or unsafe. I bet that most of
>it was actually pretty reasonable.


This seems to ignore what the guy said. *He* felt they were real bugs.


>Ada's philosophy seems to be, "When in doubt, forbid it." As a
>result, a programmer can spend a lot of time turning sensible safe
>code into code that religiously observes all of Ada rules.


Isn't it easier to think in a language from the start instead of
starting from an illegal program and "turning [it] into" a legal
program?


There are ideas of safety that appeal to generals, professors and
managers, and there are ideas of safety that apply to programmers.
Unfortunately the sets overlap, so some programmers think that some
good ideas are fascist, religious, pedantic, etc. Some people find
liberating ideas oppressive.


>C's philosopy seems to be, "When in doubt, permit it. It just might
>be correct." The freedom that this gives programmers to create new
>ways of solving problems may be one of the reasons that C remains so
>popular, despite the fact that it it unquestionably unsafe.


Lots of garbage is popular. Isn't the question what's better?


  --Steve
P.S. I guess Ada is more popular with generals than programmers.
--

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