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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Bell Labs or Microsoft security?
On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 03:32:41AM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote: > > FORTRAN/COBOL array bounds checking. Bell Labs answer: C. Who wants > the computer to check array lengths or pointers. Programmers know what > they are doing, and don't need to be "constrained" by the programming > language. Everyone knows programmers are better at arithmatic than > computers. A programmer would never make an off-by-one error. The > standard C run-time library. gets(char *buffer), strcpy(char *dest, char > *src), what were they thinking? Possibly that bounds checking is an incredible cpu suck, there are a great many powerful things you can do in C based on the fact that there is no bounds checking (pointers ARE your friend god damnit :P), and in a world before buffer overflow exploits it probably didn't matter if Joe Idiot's program crashed because he goofed? (hindsight is 20/20) -- Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
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