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From: dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk (Duncan C White)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Mesa is a dreadful language?
Message-ID: <474@ivax.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 18:39:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: ivax.474
Posted: Mon Jul 13 18:39:58 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Jul-87 06:36:32 EDT
References:  <8268@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk (Duncan C White)
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
Lines: 31

In article <8268@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> As for type safety...  Would
>> you have us go the C route, where loophole is unnecessary because
>> everything is an int?
>
>How many years has it been since you used C?  Modern C is fairly strongly
>typed, and getting more so all the time.  (Note that if you are using a
>PCC-based compiler, you are working with an implementation that is nearly
>ten years old.)  (If it's the one in 4.3BSD, it's also seriously buggy.)
>-- 

Good grief, Henry....  this is an extremely unhelpful attitude: "the PCC
compiler [ie. the standard C compiler as distributed on BSD UNIX] isn't
real C..  it's ten years out of date": what do you suggest all the BSD UNIX
users DO about having a compiler that's ancient history ?

Now I certainly agree that it would be very nice to have prototypes ..
they are the single most useful change to the language ever..

		Duncan.

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