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

["Peter Amey" <peter.amey () praxis-cs co uk>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Behalf Of Jim & Mary Ronback
> Sent: 22 April 2004 19:57
> To: Greenarrow 1
> Cc: Kenneth R. van Wyk; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; James Walden; 
> Rod Chapman
> Subject: [SC-L] Anyone looked at security features of D programming
> language compared to Spark?
>
>
> Has anyone compared D with Spark. Spark is the high-integrity 
> Ada subset 
> which allows a very powerful static analysis, using a tool called the 
> Spark Examiner.

Might be interesting; however, I always deeply suspicious of feature comparison lists because what matters is "are the 
features useful or appropriate?".  You can easily conclude that an old and battered saloon/sedan car is better than a 
F1 racing car:

                        Sedan   F1
Number of doors     4      0
Number of windows   6      0
Seats               4      1
Fuel consumption   20      3
etc.

All great fun but not much good if you are going motor racing!

SPARK has a set of features carefully chosen to be suitable and sufficient for serious work while still allowing fast 
and very deep static analysis.  So your comparison tables would need some additional rows:

Exact semantics (source code completely predicts compiled behaviour)      YES
Complete freedom from implementation dependencies (e.g eevaluation order) YES
Statically verified design by contract YES
Static proof of freedom from all run time errors, array bounds violation etc. YES

and probably quite a few others.


Peter


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