Viewing profile — copsarebastards

I'd agree with you in some languages, but in C this would be prohibitively difficult. In general, good fluent design uses immutable objects, which makes it basically just a syntact…

That’s the danger of Occam’s razor and of simple answers. “Simplicity” is often a hiding place for our biases. We reach the conclusion we want to reach and then call it simple. --P…

That's actually a very good example, but I'd argue that this is actually a violation of the standard: memset is defined as setting the value in memory. Most optimizations on undefi…

Good luck with that. I suspect the only good C is not C.

There's a flipside to this: middle-aged-to-old people aren't choosing to participate in the silicon valley startup culture. As superuser2 noted, a 22-year-old can subsist on ramen …

I'm not missing that; you're making an assumption.

>> Computers don't have spirits > But standards committee do. Agreed. Which is why you should choose a language which was standardized by a standards committee whose goals better a…

> More specifically, they're competing to produce the fastest code for software that follows the C specification to the letter. That's not necessarily the same as producing the fas…

> What GCC is doing subverts the purpose of writing in C, which is to get close to the machine and instruct its processor to do certain things. That's not the purpose of writing in…

> This is a case of following the letter of the law (in this case the C standard) while disregarding its spirit: all the undefined behaviour was so that C compilers could accomodat…

Yeah, I'd go so far as to argue that if you need security, you probably shouldn't be writing C.

I don't think people's inability to distinguish between paying for software and paying for programming makes the statement "Software should be free" a bad statement.

I understand the problem, I'm saying that it's not GCC's problem. If you don't want undefined behavior, don't put undefined behavior in your code. The code you wrote isn't clear or…

Writing code that depends on the value of unread memory is bad for security.

I think a better design would be to separate mutators from pure functions. If a procedure mutates state, it should have a void return type, and if a procedure returns a value it sh…

That complaint isn't a valid complaint. If the checks relied on undefined behavior, the code wasn't secure. If you want to rely on the behavior of a specific version of a specific …

> On the first point I think we are talking about two different things. I am not talking about the entire signup list of Old Reader, I am talking about a user of Old Reader that us…

You're right; I'm sorry for misreading your intention. I've edited my post so it's not as directed at you.

I don't think it's the language's fault either: C is four decades old, and being bound by reverse-compatibility, they can't integrate much of the programming language research that…

> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in t…

There's a parable where a man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor, whenever I drink my coffee with the spoon in the cup, the spoon handle pokes me in the eye and it hurts." And th…

The only reasonable thing to say about this was already said upthread of the page, and quoted here: > I have worked on many programs, and whenever I found such a problem (typically…

Interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The Swiss style seems to have influenced the covers of a lot of old sci-fi books, so I mentally associate these kinds of color schemes…

> i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs' about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing ire It's not a conflation,…

> Analogies aren't evidence, they're a tool for explanation, again by semantic definition. Agreed, that's what I've been saying all along. So then why did you use an analogy? Did y…