On 29/12/2010 22:41, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
>> And Lint is only necessary due to unfortunate syntax design choices.  In
>> better designed languages, the things that Lint catches aren't legal in =
the
>> first place.  For how many other languages have people felt the need to
>> create Lint-like tools?
> Every compiler that has warnings has an implicit lint-like functionality.
>
> C has a lot of unfortunate syntax choices. On the other hand, Pascal,
> Modula and Ada made much better choices, yet we are (almost) all using C
> (or C++, javascript, java, C#, or some other C derivate). Why? I guess C
> must have done something right, but I am not sure what it is.

Purely because C was language of Choice for UNIX, BSD, MSDOS, Windows,=20
Linux.

Popularity rather than anything.
Originally it was also that as essentially a Machine Independent Macro=20
Assembler (hence dependency  on #defines and preprocessor and "make=20
files") it was easy to port and simple.

Then C had all the Libraries ...

It was longer before other languages  had production quality compilers.

Pascal and  BASIC only meant originally for teaching (BASIC originally a=20
cut down ForTran)

Modula-2 was too late

C++ was crippled by backward compatibility to C. Most C++ programs are=20
too much like C programs. The C++ designer didn't want this. It was=20
foisted on C++ by AT&T.

Of course AT&T attitude to ownership of UNIX and the University=20
involvement is directly responsible for Free BSD, GNU, Linux and the=20
rest of the last 30+ years of FOSS wheel re-inventing.


So sooner we get away from C and C like C++ programs the better. Most=20
Security flaws and bugs are due to strings & Array bounds handling and=20
traditional C string/array libraries.

A compiler can't easily check the sanity of a printf either.

I have used C++ since about 1987 and C from 1988. This is why I like=20
JALV2 on PIC, and C# or VB6 on Windows and used Modula-2 on DOS.
--=20
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