Perl has a potential buffer overflow problem. So does C, and in my opinion, any language based on C.

My major complaint with the line of thinking in this article -- that security should be built in at a fairly high level (and Perl is a high level language) -- is that it, by inference, absolves the O/S of responsibility for not permitting buffer overflows to cause problems. My experience on various flavors of MVS and VM was that any attempt by an application program to access memory outside of its data allocation resulted in immediate termination; data could not be executed as "code" nor could somebody else's memory be accessed.

Should buffer overflows be prevented at the language level? Sure; it's easy in a language without dynamic allocations and doable in a language with dynamic allocations.

emc

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In reply to Re: eWeek article: Is a New Vulnerability the Tip of the Perl Iceberg? by swampyankee
in thread eWeek article: Is a New Vulnerability the Tip of the Perl Iceberg? by marto

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