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Unix Treats Users Like Pascal


The unix permission system treats users like children. Microsoft Windows 98 treated users like consenting adults..

Unix is very strict bondage and discipline permissions-wise..which makes it more like standard pascal.

This is ironic, considering unix grew up with the C (cee) language, which let's you do anything including shooting your foot.

Hiding underneath every Unix user's foot, is a Pascal wannabe..

Another interesting fact is that OpenBSD makes use of strlcopy style functions a lot (specifying string length) rather then vulnerable strcopy without length specification. OpenBSD programmers are checking string lengths very carefully for buffer overflow problems.. since OpenBSD is secure by default. The OpenBSD programmers are studying modern C (cee) and finding out that most even experienced programmers don't know much about C. Working with the LINT tool, OpenBSD programmers have found a lot of bad code that needs a fixin'.


Jeremy Andrews: A high quality fully compliant C compiler that's small and fast, that sounds exactly like something we'd expect from the OpenBSD project. Is there any chance we'll hear about a C compiler mini-hackathon some day?

Theo de Raadt: I don't think we have found the right people to do this yet. Maybe we are picking up some skills with the effort we are putting into lint right now. It sure is teaching us how little people actually know about modern C.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550

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