Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote: >>From a safety perspective, I believe that the following constraints are > sufficient to ensure safety: > > 1. Field p must be properly initialized to a non-null pointer > before it is used. > > 2. The object pointer must not escape from the constructor > until all such type safety constraints are satisified. > In particular this constrains exception values. > > First, does everyone agree that these conditions are sufficient? > > Second, do we believe that we can specify an algorithm for checking this > property so that it can be statically determined at source level whether > a program is well-formed w.r.t. type safety?
The following paper addresses the issue of having no-null types in an object language, especially about issues with construction, when objects are not fully constructed, but available. Manuel Fähndrich and Rustan Leino, ``Declaring and Checking Non-Null Types in an Object-Oriented Language,'' Proc. 18th ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, Anaheim, CA, October 2003. http://research.microsoft.com/~maf/Papers/non-null.pdf I have not yet fully read the paper. It might also turn out to be an overkill for the particular problem currently at hand. Swaroop. _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
