[Oberon] Memory-unsafe languages discouraged by US Government

[Chris Burrows]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2024 at 2:58 PM Pablo Cayuela <pablo.cayuela at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I read the news about this, and I was gladly surprised to see
> Delphi-Pascal on the suggestions.
> I've also read another point of view of the report here:
>
> https://hackaday.com/2024/02/29/the-white-house-memory-safety-appeal-is-a-security-red-herring/
>
> And I wonder, is Oberon in any of its versions, a memory-safe language?
> What mechanisms does it have or need to achieve that goal?
>

That alternative point of view includes some good points. Memory-safety is
an aspect of the bigger picture which I prefer to call Software
Reliability. I talked about this with respect to Oberon-07 in my
presentation at the ETH Oberon Day in 2011. There is a video recording of
this titled "ARM Embedded Development Using Oberon-07" at

https://video.ethz.ch/events/2011/oberon.html

In particular, see the section from time 19:00 to 24:50 (mins: secs).

In summary I said

"I took the 142 rules of the MISRA-C:2004 "Guidelines for the use of the
C language in critical systems" and applied them to Oberon-07. I
discovered that more than 70% of the rules are NOT required when
programming in Oberon-07. They are either already enforced by the language
or are not applicable."

You can see some examples of these guidelines in an earlier post in this
mailing list:

Subject: Re: [Oberon] Oberon as (embedded) rtos,  12 November 2018

https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2018/012534.html

Regards,
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
https://www.astrobe.com/RISC5
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