Re: A Famous Security Bug

Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> writes:

Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> writes:

On 24/03/2024 16:45, Tim Rentsch wrote:

The C standard means what the ISO C group thinks it means.
They are the ultimate and sole authority.  Any discussion about what
the C standard requires that ignores that or pretends otherwise is
a meaningless exercise.

>
An intentionalist.

>
That is a misunderstanding of what I said.
>

But when a text has come about by a process of argument, negotation
and compromise and votes, is that postion so easy to defend as it
might appear to be for a simpler text?

>
It's not a position, it's an observation.  The ISO C committee is
the recognized authority for judgment about the meaning of the C
standard.  Whatever discussion may have gone into writing the
document is irrelevant;  all that matters is that the ISO C
group went through the approved ISO process, and hence the world
at large defers to their view as being authoritative on the
question of how to read the text of the standard.

I agree only to some extent.

I agree that the committee is the primary authority on what the words
they publish mean.  If a passage in the standard is unclear, it's the
committee that will publish an official response to any defect report.
Sometimes that response will be something like "The current wording is
clear enough, and here's what it means".

But most of the standard has not been subject to such defect reports,
and the only source of information we have *or need* is the standard
itself.  If the standard says, to pick an entirely arbitrary example,
"A pointer to any object type may be converted to a pointer to
void and back again; the result shall compare equal to the original
pointer.", I don't need the committee to explain what that means.

It's the committee's job to publish words whose meaning is sufficiently
clear, and overall I'd say they've done that job reasonably well.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
Working, but not speaking, for Medtronic
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */