Re: recycled rant from another list

From: Stephen D. Williams (sdw@lig.net)
Date: Thu Apr 12 2001 - 08:28:22 PDT


"Adam L. Beberg" wrote:
>
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Joseph S Barrera III wrote:
>
> > IF it's impossible to write C code without buffer overruns

It's not impossible, just a pain and you have to avoid certain functions
in certain contexts.

There is a version of gcc that catches buffer overruns as soon as they
happen, for more secure daemons.

...
> > THEN why do we run privileged internet-accessible services written in C?

Because it's more efficient that most alternatives and most relavent
idioms are easily available.
 
> Because people who design operating systems are forking morons and only
> use one bit (literally the supervisor bit) of the many levels of security
> the hardware has in it, so there isnt a damn thing a programmer can do
> about it other then then run Bill and Linus through with a pike and hope
> someone with a clue replaces them.
>
> Never trust someone who learned to code on a computer with more then 32KB of
> RAM.

1st computer: 4k handheld, basic
2nd computer: 16k Atari400 w/cassette basic, 6502 assembly, forth, lisp,
small C ("Deep Blue C"), etc.
3rd computer: 32k Atari pre-1200xl w/floppy, 300 baud modem, etc.

;-)

> - Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
> http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
> beberg@mithral.com

sdw

-- 
sdw@lig.net  http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams
43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 
Dec2000



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