Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level

wclodius@earthlink.net (William Clodius)
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 23:03:36 -0700

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Related articles
Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level seimarao@gmail.com (2014-02-10)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (2014-02-11)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2014-02-11)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level ivan@ootbcomp.com (Ivan Godard) (2014-02-10)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level wclodius@earthlink.net (2014-02-10)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level seimarao@gmail.com (Seima Rao) (2014-02-11)
Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level ivan@ootbcomp.com (Ivan Godard) (2014-02-12)
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From: wclodius@earthlink.net (William Clodius)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 23:03:36 -0700
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 14-02-007
Keywords: architecture, debug
Posted-Date: 11 Feb 2014 01:52:32 EST

<seimarao@gmail.com> wrote:


> Its been a long time since Java & .Net introduced safe address
> types to the computing world.
>
> My question is have we settled on what could be a proper representation
> for safe pointers ?
>
> Some Mainframes like the 390 have historically supported safe pointers,
> I remember.
>
> Sincerely,
> Seima Rao.
> [I looked at my S/390 Principles of Operation, and I see a bunch of stuff
> for tracing, but nothing that looks like safe pointers. I'd think it was
> hardware dependent, e.g., if a machine has a fairly clean and efficient
> trap for an unmapped zero address, you'd use that, but if it doesn't, you'd
> do something else. -John]


To me it sounds like they are interested either in capabaility
architectures


<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security>


or something similar to dope vectors


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dope_vector


for something like Algol 60/68, APL, Matlab, or Fortran 90+. Dope
vectors can in principle be used for scalars as well as arrays, as a
software substitute for a capability architecture, but most users
would dislike the overhead.


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