Editing Software bug (section)

=== Language support ===

Newer [[programming language]]s tend to be designed to prevent common bugs based on vulnerabilities of existing languages. Lessons learned from older languages such as [[BASIC]] and [[C (programming language)|C]] are used to inform the design of later languages such as [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]] and [[Rust (programming language)|Rust]].

A [[compiled]] language allows for detecting some typos (such as a misspelled identifier) before [[Runtime (program lifecycle phase)|runtime]] which is earlier in the [[software development process]] than for an [[Interpreter (computing)|interpreted]] language.

Languages may include features such as a static [[type system]], restricted [[namespace]]s and [[modular programming]]. For example, for a typed, compiled language (like [[C (programming language)|C]]):

 float num = "3";

is syntactically correct, but fails type checking since the right side, a string, cannot be assigned to a float variable. Compilation fails {{endash}} forcing this defect to be fixed before development progress can resume. With an interpreted language, a failure would not occur until later at runtime.

Some languages exclude features that easily lead to bugs, at the expense of slower performance {{endash}} the principle being that it is usually better to write simpler, slower correct code than complicated, buggy code. For example, the [[Java (programming language)|Java]] does not support [[pointer (computer programming)|pointer]] arithmetic which is generally fast, but is considered dangerous; relatively likely to cause a major bug. 

Some languages include features that add runtime overhead in order to prevent some bugs. For example, many languages include runtime [[bounds checking]] and a way to handle out-of-bounds conditions instead of crashing.