How can C Programs be so Reliable?

"C is unreliable" is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem. The argument against C is that it is inefficient. It's not that C programs are broken; it's that if you spend six hours writing C code your code will either do less, or be more broken, than what you would have produced had you spent those six hours writing, e.g., Perl or Javascript or Lisp instead. There's no reason why you can't write correct C code, or correct assembly…

People often write in higher level languages because they want lots of bad code fast. Almost all business applications are CRUD apps (create/retrieve/update/destroy) with some business logic, and they're generally written in C#. The app may crash when you click the wrong button, but the app is cheap to develop and the programmers are easily replaceable. Of course I'm generalizing, and a lot of C# programmers write great and reliable code. The point is that they often don't -need- to…

First: Pointers do have a simple real-world analogy. They're post office box numbers. A given post office box is a container with a fixed size and a fixed number. You can refer to a post office box using that number. You can also do things like say "Get me everything from the four post office boxes beginning with post office box 20." or "Go to post office box 3, go down two boxes, and get me what's in the post…