[TUHS] Comments on "C"

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Sat Sep 3 07:23:56 AEST 2016


On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:

> Programming well requires a lot of thought and care and careful 
> rereading, and often throwing half the code out and re-doing it better, 
> and until we can have a programming community the majority of whom are 
> up to those challenges, we will continue to have crashes and security 
> vulnerabilities and other embarrassing bugs aplenty, no matter what 
> language is used.

I think I saw that in CACM: "Prepare to throw out half your code, because 
you will anyway".

Then there was the time I saw a Uni student, when, ambling down the 
corridor at UNSW Comp Sci, he tripped and spilled the entire deck of 
cards; after laughing for a while, I helped him to put them through the 
reader-sorter (fortunately, they were sequenced, I think).

When I think back on some of the code I wrote, I still shudder...  Mind 
you, this was back in the days of the IBM-360 and the PDP-11, and I'd only 
just graduated, m'lud.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."



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