Re: VMS

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 20/06/2025 05:43, c186282 wrote:

The software industry has been trying this for decades now. It does not
work.

 
   At some point, soon, they need to start flagging
   the unsafe functions as ERRORS, not just WARNINGS.

 
The problem is that C was designed by two smart people to run on small
hardware for use by other  smart people.
 
Although they didn't *invent* stack based temporary variables I was
totally impressed when I discovered how they worked.
 
But the potential for overrunning *any* piece of memory allocated for a
variable is always there unless you are using the equivalent of a whole
other CPU to manage memory and set hard limits.
 
You can get rid of using the program stack which helps, but the problem
remains

Any language which provides the programmer the equivalent of BASIC's
"poke" provides the programmer with the ability to corrupt memory.

Whether that corruption leads to a security issue instead of the
ordering of 32456 widgets when 42 were intended, depends upon the
nature of the corruption.