Queue cleanup

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:41:20 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

>> Part of the problem is C itself.
> 
> And yet, what are these complicated garbage collectors, that you intend
> relying on to work correctly with all their layers of tricks upon
> tricks, written in? C.

Not necessarily.

Pascal, despite the contempt it is held in by university computer science 
departments, isn't quite dead, and some Pascal compilers use garbage 
collectors written in Pascal. FreePascal, I believe, is one of them.

Likewise for other not-dead-yet low-level languages like Ada and Forth. 
As surprising as it seems to many, C is not the only low-level language 
around suitable for writing high-quality, efficient code. Just ask the 
Lisp community, which is thriving. For some definition of thriving.

Admittedly C has far more attention to it than the others, so [insert 
weasel words here] the best C compilers tend to produce more efficient 
code than the best of the others, but Pascal, Ada and similar give you 
more security than C.

I believe that when computer scientists of the future look back at the 
last few decades, they will judge that on balance C did more harm than 
good. Not that C is the only language that people can write buggy or 
insecure code, but C does tend to give the bugs so much help... :)



-- 
Steven