>> The main thing C has that most other languages don't is *unsafe* >> data typing - the ability to subvert the type system at the drop of >> a cast, and the programming tradition to do this a lot. > {Sighs.} You really seem to have it out for C.
I didn't write that the double-quoted text, but it seems to me that you are reading a pejorative attitude into it that I'm not sure belongs there. That _is_ one of the bigger things C has - and, like many language features, it's a double-edged sword. It makes possible a lot of things, many useful, many dangerous, and in some cases, even, both at once. It is possible to come fairly close to type-safe C. But even in the most type-safe of my programs, I sometimes find a need to break the type safety for one reason or another - and C lets me do that without extreme gyrations. (I remember the FORTRAN I used in my larval phase, back in the 1980s under VMS; IIRC doing the equivalent of following a pointer was rather difficult without the use of a helper routine and a language extension.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B