<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>Of course you can write secure stuff I any language - it's just that it's extremely difficult in things like C++ and others of that ilk (and you have to avoid use of some of its features)</div></blockquote><br></div><div>And, by extension, you can write FORTRAN in anything, although I was impressed by this: <a href="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039535">http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039535</a></div><div><br></div><div>If there's anyone alive that hasn't read the original "real programmers" article, which opens</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; ">The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use Fortran. Quiche Eaters use Pascal. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately by this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 Fortran G and H compilers. Real Programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done-- they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a Fortran IV compiler, and a beer.</span></blockquote><div><br></div>it's currently available at <a href="http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html">http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html</a> <div><br></div><div><br><div>Although I notice one irony, after our friends in the US lost a probe through confusing imperial and metric units (and one is reminded of Benneton F1, who when they had US-designed Ford engines opted to replace all the external fasteners with custom-made ones with imperial threads and metric heads, so as to only need one set of spanners for fly-aways).</div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; ">The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/- 3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or Pascal programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.</p></blockquote></div><div><p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; ">How did that work out later?</p><p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; "><br></p><p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; ">ian</p></div></div></body></html>