[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Buffer overflow found/fixed in v4 tape ;)

[Paul Winalski via COFF]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 4:00 PM Larry McVoy via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:

>
> I tend to be in the camp that you can make C work, but it takes a lot of
> discipline.  My kid is in the CS PhD program at USC and he asked me about
> C.  My answer was: "C is like a sports car on a twisty mountain road where
> the edge of the road is a cliff.  If you take your eyes off the road, it's
> pretty much instant death.  So it doesn't work for the people who want to
> text and drive.  On the other hand, if you are an expert driver, are 100%
> focussed on the drive, it's fun.  C is like that.  It doesn't work well
> for a lot of people, but it can be fun and work very well for a small
> subset of programmers".
>

BLISS is even worse.  It's an unguarded band saw.  C at least has data
typing, even if it is somewhat fast and loose.  BLISS has no data types (or
more correctly, exactly one data type--the BLISS value).  That, and the
explicit fetch operator, mean one must program very carefully.

-Paul W.