Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

On 9/29/24 02:06, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 28/09/2024 22:41, geodandw wrote:

On 9/28/24 17:20, John Levine wrote:

According to The Natural Philosopher  <tnp@invalid.invalid>:

The need to speed up BASIC was why I learnt Assembler...

>
Dartmouth BASIC on the GE 635 compiled your program into machine code
and then ran it, so it was pretty snappy.  The compiler was so fast that
it wasn't worth keeping the objsct code around.  They didn't have a linker
until they added a PL/I compiler that was as slow as PL/I compilers are.
>
All this running 100 users on a machine the size of the KA-10 PDP-10.
>

Then I moved onto C, and that was the best of both worlds really

>
C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than any of the
plausible alternatives at the time.
>

If you like getting security exploits due to buffer overruns.

When C was developed there was no expectation that whole generation of crap programmers who had simple dome computer science, and therefore didn't know what a CPU actually was, would take over and need to be protected form their own laziness and incompetence.
If there exists a possibility of buffer overrun, check the size of what you are putting into it.
 

And of course careful programmers never make mistakes or overlook anything.