Re: newbie inquiry

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Caffeine Junky wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 11:19:45 -0400, Ted Dennison wrote:
>>writing an OS. Thousands of security experts and script kiddies would be
>>looking for constructive things to do right now if Windows had been
>>written in Ada.
> 
> 
> I'm not so sure about that Mr. Dennison. One thing I've learned from my
> extensive experience with Windows(was an NT Admin for 4 years) and my
> regular perusals of the Bloatbusters hall of fame(www.radsoft.net) is
> that Microsoft can fuck up even the most trivial of applications,
> regardless of what language is being used.

:-)

Actually, though there is little room for doubt on this one. You 
*cannot* get buffer overflow exploits in Ada without disabling 
constraint checking (or using Unchecked programming). The worst that 
would happen is that all such attacks would turn into DoS attacks (as 
the constraint error takes your kernel down).

> Ada is an awsome tool. I use it alot now that I've finally gotten a
> handle on it. But it's no silver bullet. The only thing that can really

Actually, by Brooks' definition, its a "brass bullet". :-)