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Re: Bell Labs or Microsoft security?

  • From: Alif The Terrible
  • Date: Wed Jan 29 09:31:52 2003 
On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> 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)

I think the larger concern at that time was memory capacity.  Remember that
only the very largest machines had over 128K.