On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 03:32:41AM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
FORTRAN/COBOL array bounds checking. Bell Labs answer: C. Who wants the computer to check array lengths or pointers. Programmers know what they are doing, and don't need to be "constrained" by the programming language. Everyone knows programmers are better at arithmatic than computers. A programmer would never make an off-by-one error. The standard C run-time library. gets(char *buffer), strcpy(char *dest, char *src), what were they thinking?
Possibly that bounds checking is an incredible cpu suck, there are a great many powerful things you can do in C based on the fact that there is no bounds checking (pointers ARE your friend god damnit :P), and in a world before buffer overflow exploits it probably didn't matter if Joe Idiot's program crashed because he goofed? (hindsight is 20/20)
I think the larger concern at that time was memory capacity. Remember that only the very largest machines had over 128K.