Comment by pjmlp
3 days ago
Meanwhile, in Modula-2 from 1978, that would be
PROCEDURE my_func(msg: ARRAY OF CHAR);
Now you can use LOW() and HIGH() to get the lower and upper bounds, and naturally bounds checked unless you disabled them, locally or globaly.
This should not be downvoted, it is both factually correct and a perfect illustration of these problems already being solved and ages ago at that.
It is as if just pointing this out already antagonizes people.
A certain group of people likes to pretend before C there were no other systems programming languages, other than BCPL.
Ignoring what happened since 1958 (JOVIAL being a first attempt), and thus all its failings are excused because it was discovering the world.
I think the main reason you see this happening over and over again is because we're teaching this whole discipline wrong. By 1960 most of the problems in software development were known and had one or more solutions. Knuth spent decades just cataloging what was mostly already known (and moved the field forward in quite a few occasions as well).
And yet, you can't go a day without someone declaring that now is the time to do it right, this time it will be different. And then they proceed to do one thing after another for which the outcome is already known, just not to them. I think the best way to teach would be to start off with a fairly detailed history of what had gone before, just to give people a map and some basic awareness of the degree to which things have already been done, rather than to find new and interesting ways to shoot themselves in the foot (again).
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