Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

50 years!


49

C is a programming language which born at “AT & T’s Bell Laboratories” of USA in 1972. It was written by Dennis Ritchie.


Buffer overflows are older than C.

One of the reasons for the decline of the British computer industry was Tony Hoare, at one of the big companies (Elliott Brothers, later part of ICL), implemented Fortran by compiling it to Algol, and compiled the Algol with bounds checks. This would have been around 01965, according to his Turing Award lecture. They failed to win customers away from the IBM 7090 (according to https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...) because the customers' Fortran programs were all full of buffer overflows ("subscript errors", in Hoare's terminology) and so the pesky Algol runtime system was causing them to abort!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: