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Life without implicit casts: safe type system in C++

Authors:

Áron Baráth,

Zoltán PorkolábAuthors Info & Claims

BCI '15: Proceedings of the 7th Balkan Conference on Informatics Conference

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/2801081.2801114

Published: 02 September 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

This paper contains the findings about our ongoing research to make safe type system in C++ to avoid unwanted implicit casts. Our related research revealed vulnerabilities in current mainstream programming languages, and gave recommendations for coding styles and designing a new programming language.

The C++ language allows implicit conversions between basic built-in types as well as user-defined types with conversion operators and implicit constructors. This feature is occasionally used, but in most of the cases is a harmful construction. To avoid the unwanted implicit casts, we introduce a new wrapper template class which hides the wrapped concrete type (which usually is a basic type), and automatically defines the required constructors and operators. The wrapper can also be used with various user-defined types.

In this paper we present some code snippets, which use our wrapper class to eliminate implicit casts. Through the examples, we show the advantages of our approach, confirming with the experiences of other languages without implicit casts.

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Á. Baráth and Z. Porkoláb. Towards safer programming language constructs. In 10th Joint Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science, page 25, May 2014.

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Cited By

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Szalay RPorkolab Z(2022)Flexible semi-automatic support for type migration of primitives for C/C++ programs2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00106(878-889)Online publication date: Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00106
Szalay RSinkovics ÁPorkoláb Z(2022)Practical heuristics to improve precision for erroneous function argument swapping detection in C and C++Journal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111048181:COnline publication date: 22-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111048
Szalay RSinkovics APorkolab Z(2020)The Role of Implicit Conversions in Erroneous Function Argument Swapping in C++2020 IEEE 20th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00028(203-214)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00028

Life without implicit casts: safe type system in C++
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages

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Published In

BCI '15: Proceedings of the 7th Balkan Conference on Informatics Conference

September 2015

293 pages

ISBN:9781450333351

DOI:10.1145/2801081

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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UCV: University of Craiova

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 September 2015

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Short-paper
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Refereed limited

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BCI '15

BCI '15: 7th Balkan Conference in Informatics

September 2 - 4, 2015

Craiova, Romania

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BCI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 74 submissions, 43%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 97 of 250 submissions, 39%

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Szalay RPorkolab Z(2022)Flexible semi-automatic support for type migration of primitives for C/C++ programs2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00106(878-889)Online publication date: Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00106
Szalay RSinkovics ÁPorkoláb Z(2022)Practical heuristics to improve precision for erroneous function argument swapping detection in C and C++Journal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111048181:COnline publication date: 22-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111048
Szalay RSinkovics APorkolab Z(2020)The Role of Implicit Conversions in Erroneous Function Argument Swapping in C++2020 IEEE 20th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00028(203-214)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00028

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