Re: Does Ada need a 'secure coding standard' as well?

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Sat, 28 May 2011 20:53:25 +0200, Nasser M. Abbasi <nma@12000.org> a  
écrit:

> I saw that CMU makes now what is called CERT (secure coding standards)
> for different languages. They have Java, C, C++ in there.
>
> These are supposed to be rules that a programmer should adopt to
> make the code written by that language more 'safe' and 'secure'
>
> Here is the one for C for example
>
> https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode/CERT+C+Secure+Coding+Standard
You can guess these recommendations are all languages specific. Ex. the  
common recommendation to write

    if (condition) {
       do ();
    }

instead of

    if (condition)
       do ();

makes no sense for Ada, which has already handle this: you always write

    if Condition then
       do;
    end if;

There is no other way to do, so no rules to have there.

Well, this matters about how-to-write are mostly already embedded in the  
language rules (that is one of its target: readability, and principle of  
least-surprise).


Except that, there already exist to some Ada subset, or profiles. One of  
the most common is the one which is required with SPARK. Here again, no  
need to setup some rules and ask the authors to follow these rules and  
nothing else, as these are already checked by the SPARK Checker.

But nothing is perfect, there may be some interested rules to be applied  
to Ada, just that there will be few, and there all should be mostly domain  
specific, as the ones about the large principles, are already there (I  
believe).


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.”  [Epigrams on  
Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [Idem]
“c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */” [Anonymous]