Re: Scheme book recommendations

["Peter C. Norton" <spacey at lenin dot nu>]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 05:58:44PM -0400, Harvey J. Stein wrote:
> So you're only allowing everyone on the machine into your account
> instead of everyone on the internet?  Still not so cool.

I think the example is a cool idea.  Implementing security shouldn't be done
in place of the current example, it should be done as additional examples,
with explanations of why the additional features werea dded.  Otherwise
you've just written yet another scheme program that doesn't make headway
towards educating an ew user.  Maybe writing a program that does some kind
of trivial authentication for connected users would be good?  How about one
that does that in a chroot()'d jail?

> One of the points of guile as opposed to other languages is the safety
> of programming with it.  We shouldn't give examples that are
> fundamentally unsafe.

I don't think security is a big point in guile over perl or python.  At
least, it's probably a wash which one is the msot secure.

> A server example should be cognizant of the dangers of writing a
> server.  If we had a safe-top-repl, we could use that.  Barring that,
> one should make it a simple data server, such as maybe just returning
> the date & exiting, etc.

I agree that it should be more secure, but there should be more choices then
just "make it ultra secure or throw it away."

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.