Re: Safe Pointers at the Intermediate Language or Hardware Level

<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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