first programming languages, and second ones too

[Guy Steele <gls@think.com>]

   Date: Wed, 21 Feb 90 09:39:47 EDT
   >From: gjc@mitech.com

   There are more obvious practical and commercial advantages to knowing
   the language C rather than Pascal, so I would think students would be
   better served learning and using that language as a second language
   after Scheme. 

   * with a reasonable ANSI compiler supporting prototypes, and especially one
   that supports a "require-prototypes" compilation flag, it seems you get
   about as much strict type checking out of a C program as out of an equivalent
   program in Pascal.

Hm.  And none of that nasty array-bounds checking that costs so
many cycles.  Much better to let machines crash or behave strangely.
See, for example, the mailer buffer overflow bug recently discoverec
at Stanford (ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 15, 5, January 1990,
page 7, item "Risks of Mail").

   * C has more modern/natural I/O primitives, not the funny ancient mainframe
   O/S oriented stuff in standard Pascal.

Double hm.  You mean like "gets", which made possible parts of the
Morris worm?
   ...

--Guy  :-)