Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 15:32:48 +0200 From: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no> To: Marius Bendiksen <Marius.Bendiksen@scancall.no>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 64-bit time_t Message-ID: <19980817153248.61372@follo.net> In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19980817141851.00a51710@mail.scancall.no>; from Marius Bendiksen on Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 02:18:51PM %2B0200 References: <Pine.SGI.3.96.980817075447.5095P-100000@animaniacs.itribe. <199808141756.LAA24900@lariat.lariat.org> <199808171200.GAA21209@lariat.lariat.org> <3.0.5.32.19980817141851.00a51710@mail.scancall.no>
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(Moved to -chat where it belongs) On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 02:18:51PM +0200, Marius Bendiksen wrote: > >Nope, we're talking about safety measures in the language and compiler. Of > >which we are consumers, unless we choose to reinvent both (which generally > >is not the project at hand). > > Regardless of the claimed secureness of a language, the designer/programmer > of a product should always take it upon himself to add an extra layer of it > by making sure his code doesn't have any potential flaws. I agree with what > was said earlier, taking a compiler on trust is a bad move. Of course, you > should get a car with an airbag, but that's no excuse to drive too fast. > > Besides which, the lack of such measures in C / C++ empowers the programmer > to a great extent. I regularly hear this claim. Do you have any reasonable argument in favour of it? The ability to be close to the machine mapping is _not_ a reasonable argument - this is just an argument for why it is easy to write compilers making reasonably decent code (while it makes it hard to write compilers that make great code). > Heuristics have not yet progressed far enough to second- > guess a programmer as well as he himself can; when such is the case, we'll > all be outdated. (with the exception of heuristics programmers, of course.) If this statement is intended to apply to the speed of generated code: Can you give any references or data sets indicating this claim? As far as I know, this is just not true anymore - compilers can usually generate better code than humans can, unless the human use an unreasonable amount of time to write the code (analyzing exact cache/pipe effects). Eivind. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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