Hermes (programming language)

Hermes is a language for distributed programming that was developed at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1986 through 1992. Hermes' primary features included:^[1]

• Language support of processes and interprocess communication.
• Compile-time verification that operations use initialized data.
• Representation-independent data aggregates called tables.
• Lack of pointers.

The compile-time checking of data initialization, called "typestate analysis", is an early precedent for the definite assignment analysis performed by Java, Cyclone and C#. Hermes and its predecessor, NIL, appear to have been the earliest programming languages supporting this form of initialization checking.

References

1. ↑ "Hermes Language Experiences". Willard Korfhage and Arthur P. Goldberg. Software — Practice and Experience, Vol. 25(4), 389–402 (April 1995).