ABSTRACT
Both International Organization for Standards 26262 and International Electrotechnical Commission 61508 strongly recommend the use of “language subsets,” placing restrictions on the use of various language features so as to avoid some of the more misleading or ambiguous parts of the language and to reduce the possibility of runtime errors. These restrictions are normally defined in a coding standard. It is unusual for designers and programmers to be given a free choice of programming language. Often there is a legacy system already coded, on which the new system is to be built; normally, the development company will have support for only a few languages, and some languages are simply not suitable for some tasks. One major positive characteristic is an unambiguous and complete definition of the language. Real-time applications may need to behave predictably so that timing guarantees can be met.
