strong/weak typing and pointers

[Oliver Fromme]

Diez B. Roggisch <deetsNOSPAM at web.de> wrote:
 > And pointers are not evil in themselves - the are a neccessity to create
 > recursive structures. But deliberately casting pointers can be very harmful 
 > - a reason why its forbidden in languages like java and AFAIK ada.

I agree.  A language worth mentioning in this context might
be Cyclone.  It's derived from C (and still has very much in
common with it, so it's easy to port C programs to Cyclone).
The difference is that "safe" features have been added to the
language.  For example, you can't do arbitrary type casts on
pointers anymore, and you can't access strings (or other
allocated memory) beyond their end.  The ultimate goal of
Cyclone is to make it impossible for programs to crash or
have security holes caused by buffer overflows or similar.

Furthermore, Cyclone provides interesting features, such as
tagged unions, parametric polymorphism, pattern matching,
exceptions, even a somewhat limited implementation of type
inference.

http://www.research.att.com/projects/cyclone/

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, Konrad-Celtis-Str. 72, 81369 Munich, Germany

``All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream.''
(E. A. Poe)