I find Adam's book very thought-provoking, but I'm not at all persuaded that his approach is safer. He advocates run-time bounds-checking on every memory access, but of course that only works to convert one kind of program failure into another, and then only potentially — if you're indexing the points "table" with a circle index, you're only ever going to get a detected error if there are more circles than points. The corresponding bug in a struct-based program is a compile-time error (although, in C, only since V7 UNIX; in V6 all struct fields were in a single namespace).