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Subject: Re: How to build the *weakest* program

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 21:23:02 08/20/02

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On August 20, 2002 at 23:48:30, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On August 20, 2002 at 23:16:03, Russell Reagan wrote:
>
>>On August 20, 2002 at 18:34:29, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>Purely an accident.  According to the ISO C standard, it is perfectly OK for
>>>execution of the program to cause demons to fly out of your nose (an ancient
>>>interpretation from news:comp.std.c).
>>>
>>>The printf() function is varadic (variable number of arguments).  If you compile
>>>a varadic function without a prototype in scope, the behavior of the program is
>>>undefined.
>>
>>The levels of truth:
>>
>>4. What someone else tells you
>>3. What you read in a book
>>2. What you read in the documentation
>>
>>and the highest level of truth is...
>>
>>1. What the thing does when you run it
>
>Seat of the pants programming kills people.  Literally.

It's not best to just try something and go with it just "because it works," I
agree. But it is best (IMO) that you do what works instead of what is supposed
to work, if what is supposed to work doesn't.

I sure wouldn't want the web server that's under my care at my job (not really
my job, just a hypothetical) to get attacked just because I wrote my script
according to how it was "supposed" to work, when in reality it doesn't exactly
work as documented.

Russell



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