Risks of faults intrinsic to software languages: Trade-off between design performance and application safety. Safety Science

A lot of products embed software applications carrying out complex functions (e.g. cars, aircrafts, and medical equipments). More and more authority for control is placed on these applications whose failures may lead to accidental loss. Numerous methods have been developed to prevent these failures. These methods apply either to the programs developed or to the design activities. However, the programming or modelling languages used to operationalise the solutions as software applications are rarely questioned. These languages constitute the technology of realization of the program. On one hand, the language features are selected to increase the development performance and to decrease the software application costs. On the other hand, these features may be at the origin of specific types of faults which constitute the intrinsic risks of these languages. Therefore, the choice of a language or of a subset of a language, leads to a decision-making issue of how to deal making safety and performance trade-offs. The first part of the paper analyzes the evolution of the programming languages. We show that these changes were aimed at the convergence of design performance improvement with designed application safety. The introduction of the object-oriente