Software Fault Prevention by Language Choice: Why C is Not My Favorite Language

How much does the choice of a programming language influence the prevalence of bugs in the resulting code? It seems obvious that at the level at which individuals write new programs, a change of language can eliminate whole classes of errors, or make them possible. With few exceptions, recent literature on the engineering of large software systems seems to neglect language choice as a factor in overall quality metrics. As a point of comparison we review some interesting recent work which implicitly assumes a program must be written in C. We speculate on how reliability might be a#ected by changing the language, in particular if we were to use ANSI Common Lisp. 1 Introduction and Background In a recent paper, W. D. Yu [6] describes the kinds of errors committed by coders working on Lucent Technologies advanced 5ESS switching system. This system's reliability is now dependent on the correct functioning of several million lines of source code. 1 Yu not only categorizes the error..

A review of mathematica

The Mathematica computer system is reviewed from the perspective of its contributions to symbolic and algebraic computation, as well as its stated goals. Design and implementation issues are discussed