[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?
>

Subsequent to my previous reply I rediscovered Wirth's paper titled
"Modula-2 and Oberon". He describes the language changes that were made to
improve safety during the evolution from Pascal to Oberon via Modula-2.

"By eliminating all potentially unsafe facilities, the most essential step
was finally made to obtain a truly high-level language. Watertight type
checking, also across modules, strict index checking at run-time,
nil-pointer checking, and the safe type extension concept let the
programmer rely on the language rules alone. There is no longer a need to
know about the underlying computer, or how the language is translated and
data are represented. The old goal, that a language must be defined without
mentioning an executing mechanism, had finally been reached."

The paper can be downloaded from:

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June.doc

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