4 ms·

There are lots of languages that are not "safe" in your terms. I'll limit them to ones I am fairly expert in - assembler, FORTH, Object Pascal, but there are ma

• jerf 6y ago
  FORTH and Object Pascal are not in common use. Languages actually 100% dying are rare. I'm very, very confident that there are people out there working in them full time, and making a good living. But they are not even remotely in the same tier as Java, Python, Go, C++, C, Objective C, etc. Again, this depends on your definition of "common", but... can anyone tell me with a straight face that Java and FORTH are in the same class of usage? Also, I already called out assembler as an exception. By its nature it will always be unsafe. This is fine by me, because any restriction that it lays down will be something that no language above it can possibly get around, no matter how good an idea that may become in a future, which is dangerously restrictive over the long term. I don't look to assembler to provide language-level safety. I don't want assembler to, say, rigidly protect the "private" fields of objects from exterior access, because then my debuggers and state viewers and other tools become impossible.
• pjmlp 6y ago
  Object Pascal is definitly safer. - bounds checking - proper strings - strong typed enumerations - parameter references cannot be forced to nil (C++ ones can be tricked into null and C doesn't have them anyway)
  • yakubin 6y ago
    Is there a spec for Object Pascal? I'm wondering what document I should follow, if I wanted to write a compiler for it. UPDATE: From what I see[1], there is a proposed standard, but no finalized one. [1]: <http://pascal-central.com/standards.html http://pascal-central.com/standards.html>