Lesson plan
Hermes (programming language)
Hermes is a language for distributed programming that was developed at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1986 through 1992, with an open-source compiler and run-time system. Hermes' primary features included: * Language support of processes and interprocess communication. * Compile-time verification that operations use initialized data. * Representation-independent data aggregates called tables. * Lack of pointers. It used typestate analysis to check variables transitions errors, to rule out some semantically non meaningful transitions from one state to another (i.e. starting from a value, some sequences of operations on a variable are nonsensical), of which reading an uninitialized variable is a special case. In this role of compile-time checking of data initialization is similar to definite assignment analysis performed by Java, Cyclone and C#. Hermes and its predecessor, NIL (Network Implementation Language), were the earliest programming languages supporting this form of initialization checking. Typestate was actually used more extensively, to generate compiler-inserted "delete" operations.
Article summary
Hermes is a language for distributed programming that was developed at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1986 through 1992, with an open-source compiler and run-time system. Hermes' primary features included: * Language support of processes and interprocess communication. * Compile-time verification that operations use initialized data. * Representation-independent data aggregates called tables. * Lack of pointers. It used typestate analysis to check variables transitions errors, to rule out some semantically non meaningful transitions from one state to another (i.e. starting from a value, some sequences of operations on a variable are nonsensical), of which reading an uninitialized variable is a special case. In this role of compile-time checking of data initialization is similar to definite assignment analysis performed by Java, Cyclone and C#. Hermes and its predecessor, NIL (Network Implementation Language), were the earliest programming languages supporting this form of initialization checking. Typestate was actually used more extensively, to generate compiler-inserted "delete" operations.
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.