Hermes is a language for

distributed programming A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

that was developed at IBM's

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and with ...

from 1986 through 1992, with an open-source compiler and run-time system. Hermes' primary features included: * Language support of processes and

interprocess communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categoriz ...

. *

Compile-time In computer science, compile time (or compile-time) describes the time window during which a computer program is compiled. The term is used as an adjective to describe concepts related to the context of program compilation, as opposed to concep ...

verification that operations use initialized data. * Representation-independent data aggregates called tables. * Lack of

pointer Pointer may refer to: Places * Pointer, Kentucky * Pointers, New Jersey * Pointers Airport, Wasco County, Oregon, United States * The Pointers, a pair of rocks off Antarctica People with the name * Pointer (surname), a surname (including a list ...

s. 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 In computer science, definite assignment analysis is a data-flow analysis used by compilers to conservatively ensure that a variable or location is always assigned before it is used. Motivation In C and C++ programs, a source of particularly d ...

performed by

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

, 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.

References

Distributed computing Programming languages Static program analysis tools {{prog-lang-stub