3 ms·
From the article: "It led to Oberon, a language derived from Modula-2 by eliminating less essential features (like subrange and enumeration types) in addition
by alricb 12y ago
From the article:
"It led to Oberon, a language derived from Modula-2 by eliminating less essential features (like subrange and enumeration types) in addition to features known to be unsafe (like type transfer functions and variant records)."
Does anybody know what the argument about the safety of variant records is?
- ufo 12y agoI think he might be talking about C-style unions instead of ML-style algebraic data types.
- claystu 12y agoWirth is a true believer in strong typing: marrying strong types to inflexible compilers If I understand that quote, he means that variant records are dangerous because they make it possible for programmers to interpret data in different ways, thus bypassing the type checks of the compiler and invalidating the whole concept of strong typing. He mentions a little more about this in his paper on The History of Modula 2 and Oberon: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon....