Re: Partial retraction (was: Re: catcalls/convert)

Le mardi 3 Mai 2005 05:24, Richard A. O'Keefe a écrit :
> 	I sure don't. Void-safety is exciting.
>
> Void-safety is a nice idea, albeit one sufficiently old that the only
> "exciting" about it is seeing it adopted in a core language rather than
> an annotation scheme.
> (For example, the Java verifier ESC/Java -- now replaced by ESC/Java2 --
> has offered this feature to Java programmers for quite some time, and
> of course it has been offered by SPlint for C for even longer.)
>
> I suppose I should prove my point about the age of this technique by
> a citation:
>
>     Hermes Language Experiences
>     Willard Korfhage & Arthur P. Goldberg
>     Software--Practice and Experience, Vol 25(4), 389-402 (April 1995)
>
>     "To the best of our knowledge, complete compile-time checking of
>      data initialization is unique to Hermes and its predecessor, NIL..."
>     "Typestate checking prevents reading uninitialized data or
>      dereferencing uninitialized pointers."
>     "Hermes compilers use typestate checking to track the locations in
>      the source code [where] a variable is uninitialized (and therefore
>      may not be read), and where a variant is in the wrong case (and
>      therefore may neither be read or written) and where a program value
>      is unchecked (and therefore may not be instantiated.) ..."
>
> Actually, the Hermes book (which I have not seen) came out in 1991.
> And this 14+-year-old idea is an *advance* on what's proposed for
> ECMA Eiffel.  "Exciting"?  To see _half_ an old idea adopted?

I have the Hermes book and ECMA is not half of the ideas but only an tiny 
percent of what Hermes typestate expressions can do.

I wrote in 1996 a paper on a language that would be the unification of Hermes, 
Eiffel and Prolog. 
It was a very great idea ... that i kept to me mister professor ;^)

(snip)

>
> Thanks to having to take my daughter to the hospital today for an
> unexpected followup to her sprained ankle, I no longer have the time
> to write the message I meant to.  But let me give you the keyword,
> so that if I _do_ get to write the message tomorrow you will want to read
> it.
>
>     Diarthrognathus.

best regard
jb