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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Why C++ is successful
Date: 1998/08/10
Message-ID: <EACHUS.98Aug10181929@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 379849851
References: <dewar.902415458@merv>
 <6qg3on$kjq$2@reader1.reader.news.ozemail.net> <dewar.902579285@merv>
Organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-08-10T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <dewar.902579285@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

 > The combination of GC with this kind of low level mucking is what is
 > dangerous. Of course if the LLM is carefully controlled, and isolated,
 > and well tested etc. then things can be controlled, but once you have
 > these features, it is all too common for them to be overused, and to 
 > be inadequately controlled.

   Or worse, in a mixed langauge environment, and all large projects
(probably even all small projects nowadays) are mixed language
projects, low level mucking which is "perfectly safe" in one language
is dangerous when the object being mucked with came from another
language.  You can even run into such problems when no mucking is
involved, but there is "automatic" conversion between types, usually
string types.

 > An amazing number of programmers these days work by writing approximate junk
 > code, and then spend amazing amounts of time trying to bash the code into
 > shape using a debugger. I fear that this approach, always worrisome, becomes
 > positively frightening in a GC+LLM environment :-)

   Let us all pray--there is too much of this code floating around.
Where I usually run into it is in dealing with computer security.
Seems like every week there is an exploitable security hole in some
major application to be dealt with.






--

					Robert I. Eachus

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