Some notes on Rust

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 February 2015 at 05:16:56 UTC, Vlad Levenfeld wrote:
> On Friday, 6 February 2015 at 05:05:08 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>> OT: Have you looked at Ada SPARK 2014 yet? Provides nice and 
>> strong system programming language semantics. With a 
>> verification tool... nice.
>>
>> http://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/spark_2014.html
>
> Even more OT: Most of this doc went over my head. Controlled 
> types, access types? I only grok that its meant for 
> safety-critical systems. What's this kind of programming 
> called? And can you recommend any resources for learning about 
> the subject from square one?

Access types is Ada speak for pointers.

Ada is quite expressive with pointers, as what the developers are 
allowed to do with them depends on their declaration.

Outside the ML languages, Ada is probably the only language that 
allows for expressing correct programs just by taking care to 
define the right type abstractions.

For example no need to check if a variable is inside a specific 
range, if the type only allows that range.

Or no need to check for null pointers if they are declared as non 
nullable.

It is one of my favourite languages.