Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Perl: the Markov chain saw
 
PerlMonks  

Re: Perl 6: Static/Dynamic Strong/Weak Type Systems

by fergal (Chaplain)
on Apr 15, 2006 at 23:39 UTC ( [id://543600]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Perl 6: Static/Dynamic Strong/Weak Type Systems

I don't find strong typing to be a very useful concept in dynamic lanaguages. I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about strong typing. Types are determined by the interpreter at run time. The type of a piece of data is carried along with the data so there is only 1 possible way for the interpreter to treat it - it must treat it the way that type should be treated.

The only way to break this is to allow programs to pick a pointer into arbirary memory and have the interpreter use it as a value, a feature so dangerous (and almost certainly not what you want to do) that none of the dynamic languages I know allow it (except at the interface to C, e.g. perl's XS system).

So perl and other dynamic languages are strongly typed but it's not like someone sat down and said "I'm going to make my language strongly typed", it's because a weakly typed dynamic language doesn't really make much sense.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Perl 6: Static/Dynamic Strong/Weak Type Systems
by diotalevi (Canon) on Apr 16, 2006 at 01:05 UTC

    Reach in arbitrary memory? Sure. We can do that. :-)

    unpack 'P', pack 'j', []

    ⠤⠤ ⠙⠊⠕⠞⠁⠇⠑⠧⠊

      I've never seen p and P in pack before and I can't figure out what they actually do (as in I have read the docs, tried some code but still don't understand). I thought
      #! /usr/bin/perl -l $a="fergal"; $p=\$a+0; print $p; $x=unpack("P9", pack 'j', $p); print length($x);
      might read the first 9 bytes of the SV structure for $a but it just has length 0. Do you have a demo?

      Anyway, this is not really what I'm getting at. You can't use this to try treat the memory for a perl array variable as a perl string variable, at most this allows you to treat the memory for a perl array variable as the C string inside a perl string variable.

      Imagine you could twiddle the pointer inside a perl reference value, it still wouldn't be weakly typed. If you point the ref at a bit of memory that contains a perl string variable then it will become a string-ref if you point it at an array variable it will become an array-ref (I think this is the case although I'm not an XS whizz and I don't have time to test it as I'm going on holidays in an hour!). So for perl to be weakly typed I would have to wrong and the language would have to have this reference twiddling feature built in.

        Demo? I've had this code lying around for ages:

        #!/usr/bin/perl -wl use strict; my $target = 'IHBT'; print "target contains : $target"; my $target_address = \$target + 0; # nummify my $native_version = pack 'L', $target_address; my $pointer = pack 'P', $native_version; print "target address : ", sprintf('%x', $target_address); my $sv = unpack('P4', $native_version); print "deref'd packed (sv) : ", sprintf('%x', unpack('L', $sv)); my $pv = unpack('P4', $sv); print "deref'd sv (pv) : ", sprintf('%x', unpack('L', $pv)); my $value = unpack('P' . length($target), $pv); print "deref'd pv (value) : ``$value''\n";

        I hope it helps. :)

        You're just missing a few pointer dereferences. The pack("j",...) does the int->ptr conversion. The first unpack does SvANY( $p ) to find $a. The next one doesSvANY( $a ) to find its xpv struct. The next and final unpack is dereffing the xpv_pv pointer to read the C string.

        $x = unpack "P9", unpack "P4", unpack "P4", pack "j", $p;

        This is all *reading* addressable memory. Writing back to it is a completely different trick involving faking structs for B to convince perl that strings that you control are real perl structures. You can then fake up a perl string where the pointer goes to any arbitrary location.

        ⠤⠤ ⠙⠊⠕⠞⠁⠇⠑⠧⠊

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://543600]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others sharing their wisdom with the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-29 10:46 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found