Pascal is a totally fine system s language. AEGIS (a from scratch Unix like) was written in Pascal and by all accounts was a great option at the time.
And what makes C and C++ unsafe exists in Pascal.
These days you can probably mix assembly within your Pascal code or access pointers directly with some custom language extensions, but these weren't part of the original Pascal specification.
I'm not sure where you got this idea that Pascal is memory safe.
Borland enabled adding Assembler to almost every language for which they made a compiler.
We need an AOT compiled general purpose application language like C# with managed memory access. If people want to fool around with low-level stuff let them use Rust, assembler or C/C++.
I am not Microsoft/Google/etc and do not give flying hoot about their language preferences. I ran my own business and my clients are happy. As already said not a single complaint.
Good luck hiring dedicated expert or team willing to break it. I am not Google and cost of trying to break my software where it matters far exceeds any potential benefits.
So sure, I am not the a prime choice as security target which makes it even better.
But these comprise only 30% of all security errors as the research shows. Most are due to memory management issues.
Pascal OTOH is 100% safe no matter what you do because you can't access pointers directly or do pointer math or out-of-bounds array access. The pointers available in Pascal are "managed" pointers which prevent you from accessing the underlying machine hardware.
This all incurs a little overhead, but you won't find any insecure Pascal programs due to memory mismanagement.
I am just expressing my opinion. You know, taking distraction from mundane work to talk technical things. I am not trying nor do I need to prove how I do my development/design and what tools do I use and frankly I do not give a flying hoot what others might think about it. I run my own business after all.
As to you particular point of language being unsafe because it allows typecast pointer to integer: allowing unsafe features in my view does not make language unsafe as long as it provides safe way of doing things as well. It is called flexibility in my book.
Security wise: could I've done better? Sure. Anything could be done better but you've probably heard about the law of diminishing returns. Does the fact that I use language that have unsafe feature automatically make my software unsafe if I do not use said features - big fat NO. Even if do use such feature (and rarely but sometimes I do for the sake of efficiency) it does not really change the main point.
As senior engineer at a security conscious firm, who used to freelance by writing exploits for code written by developers with your attitude, I want to make sure we don't use your software.
Are you seriously afraid to promote your business because it might be attached to your comments? That should tell you something.
And if you are as you say major security guy as you claim you probably already checked all the software you allow to use for security breaches. So you either found the problem and got rid of said software or you're just full of it.
And if your business recommendations to your company are base on "attitude" picked from internet chat or shall I say you personal likes why don't you submit this conversation to your employer.
And finally the last thing I feel like doing is promoting my business/services to people like yourself.
Do you know what an 0 day is?
> And if your business recommendations to your company are base on "attitude" picked from internet chat or shall I say you personal likes
My recommendations to my employer are based on many things, including overall security posture. The world's best engineers ship memory unsafety bugs in C and C++, including modern C++. Your statements belay an overall lack of respect for the problem space, which in my experience leads to an increase of issues, even above the general steady state.
> why don't you submit this conversation to your employer.
I plan to as soon as there is actionable information.
> And finally the last thing I feel like doing is promoting my business/services to people like yourself.
You're the one who's been regularly deciding to comment on my posts trying to convince yourself that everything you're doing is fine, and you can't do better. "People like [my]self" are just telling you that you can do better, and only when you decide to go out of your way to start shit.
I'd prefer if you stopped commenting on my posts.
I think people get hung up on the theoretical capabilities of "pure" Pascal but the forms that people actually used had all sorts of extensions. Back in the day, whether you were using Pascal or C or whatever, it probably wasn't very standards-compliant anyway.
Maybe in your old classic pascal. Not true for modern Delphi/FreePascal incarnations of it. You can do pretty much anything including pointer math, including safe version of it.