It seems to me that using a raw pointer in pack/unpack is something that taint-checking should catch. That oversight should be trivially corrected by someone with patching experience. Well, making it check the pattern argument for taint-ness up front would be trivial, but would prevent pack/unpack from working at all with user-supplied patterns (probably a good idea). Having it note the tainted string and respecting only a subset of the commands would be more difficult. Ideally, the behavior would be controlled in a manner similar to the "re" pragma for a similar issue regex's.

I think the taint concept in Perl fits nicely with the concepts you are studying. Perhaps you can contribute some meditations for Perl 6 design and Perl 5 fixes (like this) as a product of your studies. That is, tainting seems the existing tool for this concept, how can it be improved or augmented to handle modern understanding of these concepts?

—John

In reply to Re: Re^2: Auditing BEGIN blocks? by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Auditing BEGIN blocks? by diotalevi

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