Part of an interesting thread at metzdowd list! <3 Even being the worst programmer of the whole world, I learned to see beauty in codes. Suggest you all the same.
Excellent weekend, full of music, joy and cute codes for all of you! Love, love, love... <3 Ceci ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "John Levine" <[email protected]> Date: Aug 26, 2016 10:13 PM Subject: Re: [Cryptography] programming languages and the people who (don't) love them, was "NSA-linked Cisco exploit poses bigger threat than previously thought" To: <[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> >It was quite clever of C to make pointers and arrays and strings all the >same, it was efficient and elegant, but it brought dangers. Critics have >always been dismissed, with the implication that they are not Real >Programmers. > > "We are adults, we program carefully, this won't be a problem." Huh, programmers who are phenomenally overimpressed with themselves and know no history. I've certainly met a few. C was designed in the 1970s. Dennis Ritchie's PDP-11 compiler was two phases and an optional peephole optimizer, each of which could run in about 24K bytes of RAM. In that environment, the only other language to do system programming was the machine's assembler, and C was a great improvement, since it had structures to give names to data fields and enough of a type structure to keep you from using a floating point value as an integer or add two pointers together. The reasons we're still using C are not limited to stupidity. There is a huge installed base, including all of the OS code in various versions of Unix and Linux, and nothing else to date runs on as many architectures and is as usable in spare environments like OS kernels and embedded systems. ObCrypto: very little of the crypto code I use has to run in the kinds of environments where C's advantages are important, so it's a reasonable question why application libraries like openssl are still in C. R's, John _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
