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From: kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de (James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763)
Subject: Re: allocator and GC locality (was Re: cost of malloc)
In-Reply-To: Sam Kendall's message of Fri, 11 Aug 1995 23:43:34 GMT
Message-ID: <KANZE.95Aug17153033@slsvhdt.lts.sel.alcatel.de>
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References: <9507261647.AA14556@aruba.apple.com> <3v8g7l$cge@jive.cs.utexas.edu>
	<3vac07$ptf@info.epfl.ch> <3vb382$dtr@jive.cs.utexas.edu>
	<3vbl70$bht@fido.asd.sgi.com> <hbaker-3107951026250001@192.0.2.1>
	<justin-0108951458440001@158.234.26.212> <hbake
	<jyuynr@bmtech.demon.co.uk> <hbaker-0208950816000001@192.0.2.1>
	<jyvgwh@bmtech.demon.co.uk> <3vr85r$758@fido.asd.sgi.com>
	<KANZE.95Aug9150054@slsvhdt.lts.sel.alcatel.de> <DD678p.44r@mv.mv.com>
Date: 17 Aug 1995 13:30:33 GMT
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:5085 comp.lang.misc:22727 comp.lang.lisp:18806 comp.object:36955 comp.arch:60498

In article <DD678p.44r@mv.mv.com> Sam Kendall <kendall> writes:

|> kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de (James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763) wrote:

|> >Accessing contents with an index > 0 is undefined behavior;
|> >with any implementation of reasonable quality, it will cause a bounds
|> >check error.  (Of course, I've never seen an implementation of C with
|> >reasonable quality, so you may be safe.  Although I seem to have heard
|> >somewhere that there is one, Centerline, maybe?)

|> That's right; CenterLine has a C/C++ interpreter that checks all sorts of
|> things, including array and pointer bounds.  There are other products,
|> notably Purify and similar things, that catch some but not all bounds
|> violations in these awful, unsafe languages.

|> My fantasy: what if 10% of the effort spent in developing these C/C++
|> error-checking tools (I've written major chunks of several of them) were spent
|> switching programmers over to a good, safe language like Modula-3 or Dylan?

Commercially, it doesn't pay.  You sell them a good Modula-3 compiler,
maybe a little training, and they go off and write applications that
work, and you never see them again.  With C++, on the other hand, you
can be sure that they will keep coming back for more tools to try an
manage the complexity and the risk.  Which, of course, you will gladly
sell them.
-- 
James Kanze         Tel.: (+33) 88 14 49 00        email: kanze@gabi-soft.fr
GABI Software, Sarl., 8 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
Conseils en informatique industrielle --
                              -- Beratung in industrieller Datenverarbeitung


