RE: Anyone looked at security features of D programming language compared to Spark?

[ljknews <ljknews () mac com>]

At 7:31 AM -0700 4/23/04, Jeremy Epstein wrote:
> Jim & Mary Ronback opined:
> > I am hard put to find an example of a language feature which makes a 
> > system more secure but less safe or vice versa, in any context. Can 
> > anyone else think of one?
>
> Not 100%, but consider automatic garbage collection.  Tends to make a system
> more secure, because it's associated with languages that avoid pointers with
> all their evilness.

Ada avoids the evils of pointers by using something called Access Values
upon which mathematics is performed.  But for garbage collection purposes
those Access Values must be taken into account.

Ada is specified so as to allow (but not require) garbage collection by
an implementation, but to date no implementor has seen customer demand
from the Ada-using segments for garbage collection.  The only publicized
instance of garbage collection in Ada was for Ada processors that target
the Java Virtual Machine.

So at least for Ada, garbage collection is less of a language feature and
more of a compiler feature.  The avoidance of pointer arithmetic in Ada
is quite independent of garbage collection.