Thomas E. Kurtz has died

I originally learned to program with BASIC. When I was designing D, I thought back to how easy and natural string manipulation was in BASIC, and what a festering swamp of bugs it was in C.

Having strings as easy and correct in D was a major priority, and history has shown that this was a success.

P.S. Whenever I review C code, I first look at the string manipulation. The probability of finding a bug in it is near certainty. Question for the people who disagree - without looking it up, how does strncpy() deal with 0 termination?

Thank you, Thomas Kurtz!

Arrrgh! I think that I may have unintentionally insulted you in about 1987 when (as a callow youth) I was trying to pick a language for an embedded/robotics system. I believe that I spoke to you on the phone about ... ahem ... C, which you answered politely but somewhat through gritted teeth...

In the end I went for C, and the OS ended up in this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ZEUwwOYxo&t=72s

I still cringe about that call!

What was the call about?

Don't worry about it, I don't remember it! I have come to regret a lot of stupid things I said when I was younger.

Well, it was a while ago... I was trying to choose a language to use for our start-up's tiny (2kB EPROM, 2kB RAM?) Z80A system, alongside some assembler, and I was basically having to write an OS/runtime for the robot that I designed the hardware for as well. I was about out of my depth. Candidate languages were, I think, BCPL, B, C and D, and I got mixed up and spoke to you about C. (It is possible that I spoke to the B or BCPL guy rather than you.) But in any case, asking one language's creator to extol the virtues of a different language is not clever! %-P Ouch!

Does the name "Grey Matter" ring any bells for you? (Software reseller, still seems to exist...)