Reply To: Memory

You are well on the way to inventing capabilities 🙂 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_addressing

I truly wish that the Mill were a cap(ability) architecture. One of the Mill team is Norm Hardy, who did the KeyKos cap operating system, of which Eros and others are descendants. The first compiler I ever did was for the Burroughs B6500, which was a cap machine before caps were invented. One of the things that Andy Glew and I are in passionate agreement about is that computing needs caps.

That said: I know how to build a cap machine, but I don’t know how to sell one. Caps are fundamentally incompatible with C, because caps are secure and C is not. Caps machines like the AS-400 let you use C by giving you a sandbox that is one whole cap in which you can be as insecure as you want within your play-PDP11. Oh well.

And fair warning: language design is an insidious vice – you have a slippery slope ahead. Hear the words of someone whose name is in the Algol68 Revised Report 🙂