On Feb 15, 2005, at 8:55 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> I am just trying to illustrate overly lax syntax rules.
>
Almost all languages have ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
Languages that have gone to a lot of trouble to eliminate such
foot-shooting-mechanisms have found themselves rejected and
ridiculed  (I'm specifically thinking of Ada here, but the pascal
variants like modula2 come close too, I think.)

It HAS been amusing to watch C "take over the world" in spite
of all those other efforts.  I can only conclude that somehow
C managed to hit the 'sweet spot' of the power/danger curve.

To be fair, its worth pointing out that a lot of C's current
usefulness seems to come from breaking assumption of the original
language in favor of greater safety.  The latest versions of
compilers check printf arguments against the formatting string,
despite the fact that that is deep library knowledge, not only
not part of the C language, but not SUPPOSED to be part of the
language.  But still useful :-)

BillW
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