A bit further toward the flamewar

[rixed@happyleptic.org]

-[ Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:22:46PM +0200, Andy Wingo ]----
> Much respect to the late Ritchie, but C is a dangerous language that has
> negative impacts on the real world.  We need to stop writing code that
> launches the missiles (or, more likely, installs malicious keylogging
> darknets) if your program has an out-of-bounds array write.  Guile helps
> people move from C to safe languages, at their own pace :)

Scheme is safer than C, because:

- It has garbage collection, which solves many trivial memory management bugs;
- A buggy program that performs an out-of-bound array access will crash
  at runtime, which is sometime better than to proceed.
- It's much more portable than C, so that porting a program from its
  developer machine to another one is very unlikely to introduce a
  bug.

C is safer than Scheme, because:

- It has no automatic memory management, which avoids a few tricky
  memory leaks;
- A buggy program that performs an out-of-bound array access may proceed
  with wrong data, which is sometime better than to crash at runtime;
- It has a type checker ; if not state of the art, it still stops you
  from using the wrong type in runtime most of the time.

I fail to see why Scheme is intrinsically safer than C, but as I just
learnt the death of Denis Ritchie it might be that I'm emotionally biased,
so to speak.