Being safe on the internet (was Re: Here we go again - ISP DPI, but is it interception?)
Charles Lindsey
chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Mon Aug 9 11:29:29 BST 2010
On Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:15:05 +0100, Ian Mason
<ukcrypto at sourcetagged.ian.co.uk> wrote:
> Talking of safe languages no one has mentioned my old personal favourite
> Algol 68. it was even used as the systems programming language for a
> capability architecture processor and OS by Maurice Wilkes, the late
> Roger Needham, and others. Cue Dr. Gladman...
No, the safety in ALGOL 68 is too strong for systems programming work,
where you have a definite requirement to "cheat" (i.e. to treat some bit
pattern as being of different data types for different purposes - e.g. how
else can one construct machine code and expect to be able to obey it?).
If you build in a few critical "cheating machanisms", then what you have
is S3 (actually, that opened up more holes than it need have dome). And I
expect that Roger Needham et al were using ALGOL 68C, which they were in a
position to hack to provide such back doors as they found necessary.
My own ALGOL 68 compiler uses a specially hacked version of Pascal, for
exactly the same reason.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131
Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5
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