The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.) writes: > The use of trailing zero as a delimiter, like the confusion between > arrays and pointers, is omnipresent in the C world. I see no practical > way of getting rid of it without ditching most of the software written > in C. The best that you could do would be to introduce a new data type > and hope that people started using it, and I doubt that even that will > happen. > >>So, total revamp, > > Switch to PL/I? the original mainframe tcp/ip support had been done in vs/pascal ... and had none of the buffer overflow issues typically associated with a lot of c-language based networking implementations ... recent refrence: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#8 whiny question: Why won't z/OS support the HMC 3270 emulator lots of past posts mentioning various buffer overflow related problems with c language implementations http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow the pascal language implementation had originally been done by two people at the los gatos vlsi lab ... as part of a lot of work in tools supporting chip design. the compiler was eventually released as a product ... first as IUP and then as program product. the implementation was eventually also ported from the mainframe to (workstation) aix. much later, as part of corporate strategy moving to (COTS) off-the-shelf tools ... some number of the tools/applications were ported to other vendor workstations and then turned over to external (chip tool) vendor. in this exercise i was given the opportunity to port one such 60k line (vs/pascal based) application to another workstation platform. Unfortunately, the pascal implementation for that platform appeared to have never moved past the stage of being used for student educational purposes ... plus they had outsourced the implementation to an organization on the opposite of the globe (which really complicated resolving language and runtime issues). total topic drift in this indirect reference using such tool skills for redoing airline res ROUTES application http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#22 Bidirectional Binary Self-Joins http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#41 US Airways badmouths legacy system for totally other folklore ... one of the two original people responsible for pascal at the los gatos vlsi lab shows up later as vp of software development at MIPS and then (later still) general manager of the business unit that has responsibility for the original JAVA product. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
