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Re: Lisp is neither (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot)

To: jvrobert@sedona.intel.com (Jason V. Robertson~)
Subject: Re: Lisp is neither (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot)
From: Jim Blandy <jimb@cyclic.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 16:18:26 -0500
Cc: scsh-news@martigny.ai.mit.edu
>Neither were PC's running Novell.  Of course LispM's wouldn't be affected - 
>the worm targetted only Unix machines running Sendmail (I think?).

I think the worm used finger, too, but that's a tangent.  The point is
that buffer overruns have been a significant source of security holes;
in fact, I believe the Perl folks are at this moment going over the
whole Perl source tree checking for bugs of that sort, after someone
found a buffer overrun problem in them.

The LispM validated array references checking in parallel with the
fetch (?), so there was no overhead.  Thus, LispM's are not
susceptible to buffer overrun problems.

I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Baker's assertion that this quality
makes them "more secure" overall.

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