[TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Mon Jul 5 23:45:22 AEST 2021


Dan Stromberg wrote in
 <CAGGBd_o=_LhF8FtxNF+VrC6TTN6mKZMx3Li4-TCA8qiK45BPBQ at mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 8:49 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
 |> On Sun, Jul 04, 2021 at 10:36:46PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
 |>>> We both love C, we are both disciplined enough to write
 |>>> maintainable/extendable code in C, it works for us.  We really clicked
 |>>> over our love of C.
 |>>
 |>> Are you really sure that all the C code the two of you have written in
 |> your
 |>> careers carefully avoids all 191 kinds of undefined behavior in C99 (the
 |>> number has grown since then)?  Give me leave to doubt it.
 |>
 |> I'm sure there are all sorts of problems with C.  Somehow we both never
 |> encountered them.
 |>
 |
 |Actually, haven't there been many security holes discovered in sendmail?

Even more actually that is a completely unfair statement.
sendmail grew out of other software that is way over 40 years as
of this writing, and to the best of my knowledge.  It was not
written to face a vicious and hostile environment at first, even
the protocol it serves evolved over time, as anything else
surrounding it.
And then, what have the holes to do with the programming language?

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)


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