Re: Safety and power in languages

Steve Witham <truesoft!sw@uunet.uu.net> wrote:
>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.


Well, *sometimes* that's true, but in general, I disagree.


For example, Lisp feels a *lot* more flexible to me that C, despite
the fact that there are things I can't do in Lisp -- fiddling with
memory addresses at a low level. Because I'm restricted in that way,
I can freely pass pointers around in Lisp (well, *everything's* a
pointer), without worrying about dangling pointers and storage leaks.
IMHO, the "restriction" gives *more* freedom, not less.


Similarly, OOP features make a language more flexible, but you can't
have OOP without some sort of type system (you have to at least
require the programmer to say what sort of object is being created).


- Bob
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.