3D printers use a "language" called gcode. It's not really programming, it's a series of commands that tell the 3D printer nozzle to move to a certain location at a certain speed while extruding at a certain rate. There are a lot of ways you can mess that up, you can tell the nozzle to go as low as it can and just start extruding, giving you a big blob on the bottom of your 3D printer. You can tell it to move to a position that it physically can't, outside of the bounding box it can print in. Most 3D printers don't have endstops to prevent you from going too high on an axis, so they'll try to do that and tear themselves apart. You can try to extrude while your extruder isn't up to heat and grind down your filament. You can physically jam your extruder into whatever it is you're printing. There are all kinds of things that 3D printers are physically capable of doing that are unsafe.
Computers are just a machine like a 3D printer. You're "physically" moving bytes of data around (that's where most of the heat comes from), doing operations on them, etc. Nowadays you generally can't get them to destroy themselves but in the earlier history you absolutely could tell the machines to tear themselves apart in the same way you can tell a 3D printer to tear itself apart.
Computers are just machines for moving bytes around, and it's really hard to make a machine that you can only do safe stuff with.
> Computers are just a machine like a 3D printer. You're "physically" moving bytes of data around (that's where most of the heat comes from), doing operations on them, etc. Nowadays you generally can't get them to destroy themselves but in the earlier history you absolutely could tell the machines to tear themselves apart in the same way you can tell a 3D printer to tear itself apart.
This is wrong. It's not what 'unsafe' means for C or C++. You could have 100% safe hardware for your code to run on, and your code could very well still be unsafe. The phrase you're looking for is Undefined Behavior.
3D printers use a "language" called gcode. It's not really programming, it's a series of commands that tell the 3D printer nozzle to move to a certain location at a certain speed while extruding at a certain rate. There are a lot of ways you can mess that up, you can tell the nozzle to go as low as it can and just start extruding, giving you a big blob on the bottom of your 3D printer. You can tell it to move to a position that it physically can't, outside of the bounding box it can print in. Most 3D printers don't have endstops to prevent you from going too high on an axis, so they'll try to do that and tear themselves apart. You can try to extrude while your extruder isn't up to heat and grind down your filament. You can physically jam your extruder into whatever it is you're printing. There are all kinds of things that 3D printers are physically capable of doing that are unsafe.
Computers are just a machine like a 3D printer. You're "physically" moving bytes of data around (that's where most of the heat comes from), doing operations on them, etc. Nowadays you generally can't get them to destroy themselves but in the earlier history you absolutely could tell the machines to tear themselves apart in the same way you can tell a 3D printer to tear itself apart.
Computers are just machines for moving bytes around, and it's really hard to make a machine that you can only do safe stuff with.