Esthetics (or worse?) of Secure Pointers

[Jimen Ching]

Robert Bernecky <bernecky at acm dot org> said:
>As computing professionals, we have a responsibility to
>provide provably reliable tools. C without secure pointers
>is not reliable. We (the computing community) are going to
>be forced to move programming from a craft to an engineering
>discipline. Issues of performance and memory use are going
>to be swept aside by the threat of lawsuits.

Why is it that people think software professionals should always look for
silver bullets?

	As professionals, we must use GC to eliminate all memory heap
	problems.

	As professionals, we must use BP to eliminate all buffer overflow
	problems.

Would real professionals look for silver bullets to solve their problems?  
Should we not see each tool for what it is, i.e. just another tool in our
toolbox?

Btw, isn't one of the motto's of the C programming language go something
like--trust the programmer.  Now, if we could do that, then we would have
finally become a professional discipline.

Don't get me wrong, I think BP is a great tool.  But until the overhead is
reduced to less than 3%, I don't think it should be forced on anyone.

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching@flex.com     wh6brr@uhm.ampr.org