Re: Scripting

[Katie Lauren Lucas <katie@fysh.org>]

Quoting Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>:

> 
> Dan Helfman wrote:
> 
> > Everyone seems to be very polarized in this debate between slow
> > scripting languages with all kinds of safety checks and speedy
> compiled
> > languages with no checks at all. Perhaps that's because most
> languages
> > available today fall easily into one or the other of these two
> > categories. But what about a hypothetical language that is natively
> > compiled for speed, but still does some safety checks at
> compile-time
> > and possibly even at run-time.
> 
> There *are* plenty of those - Ada, Pascal, Modula - to name but three.
> 
> B (from which C evolved) was somewhat revolutionary in *NOT* checking
> array bounds.

That seems an extravagent claim, since BCPL doesn't either, and B was designed 
as a cut down version of BCPL. When it was found a compiler for B couldn't be 
easily implemented in B (part of the pitch for BCPL was that the compiler was 
written in BCPL, so it could be ported more easily) did they add some more 
features and call it C...

_______________________________________________________________________________
      Katie Lauren Lucas, Consultant Software Engineer, Parasol Solutions
katie@fysh.org katie.lucas@parasolsolutions.com http://www.parasolsolutions.com