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C with Safety - Cyclone
Paul Smith writes: "New Scientist is carrying a story about a redesigned version of the programming language C called Cyclone from AT&T labs. "The Cyclone compiler identifies segments of code that could eventually cause such problems using a "type-checking engine". This does not just look for specific strings of code, but analyses the code's purpose and singles out conflicts known to be potentially dangerous.""
Yet another language...
I have an idea, let's call it C#.
Amazing magic tricks
This would probably be more useful if some IDE company picked it up for Windows. There's a lot more buffer overflow problems there (a consequence of much more software). And Windows developers love their IDE's (shudder). Maybe Microsoft could use it to secure their OSen (that should get me some karma here ;-) !
I look at it as a grammar checker, though. If you know what you're doing, it's not hard to design software that doesn't have these problems in the first place. You don't need a type checker to write good code.
do all of it's safety checking
But not its apostrophe checking.
I'm a professional software developer, and all for anything that makes my code safer without unduly compromising it. But I can't help thinking that starting from C is probably a mistake.
C is a fundamentally unsafe language. It has some easy fixes (remove the always-unsafe gets() function from the library, for example). It has some fundamental "flaws" (pointer arithmetic and the use of void*, for example). I quoted "flaws" because, while these features make the language necessarily unsafe, they are also very helpful in the low-level programming that got C to where it is today.
The underlying problem here has never been with C, it's been with using C for the wrong jobs. Application code, and certainly high-level code where security is essential, just aren't C's strong suits. I can't see how even the geniuses we're talking about can start from such a broken language (in the context we're discussing) and successfully make a non-broken language out of it.
I would expect a much better solution to be that followed by later C-like languages. C++ retains the low-level control, but other languages (Java, C#, etc) are available to those willing to sacrifice some of that control in exchange for added safety, and consequently may be better tools for different types of project. The biggest problem at the moment is that none of these "safer" languages has yet developed the same raw expressive power of C++. As they evolve, and catch up on the 20-odd year head start, hopefully we'll see programmers given a genuine choice between "safe but somewhat limited" and "somewhat safe but unlimited".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Your all fucking faggots! Especially the fucking mods What the fuck...You guys must be the biggest losers in the world..You probably get wood when your female dog runs past your computer.
BTW the fags suck some more cockz for Al P
If I can't write things like:
;
( * ( void ( * ) ( ) ) 0 ) ( )
Then I don't want C anymore.
C is not for dummies.