[cap-talk] Delegating Responsibility in Digital Systems: Horton's "Who Done It?"

[Mark S. Miller]

Sandro Magi wrote:
> Page 1, "the dominant access control paradigms were capbilities and
> Access Control Lists"  (misspelled "capabilities")

Fixed. Thanks.


> Page 1, "A capability [...] is a communicable and unforgeable token used
> both to designate some object and to provide access to that object."
> 
> Nitpick, but "designate" and "provide access" seem synonymous. I think
> "designate some object and authorize access" is clearer.

Fixed: "... a communicable and unforgeable token used both to designate some 
object and to permit access to that object."



> Page 2, "The round objects in the figures, A, B, and C,", is better
> stated as "The circles in the figures...", or "The circles A, B, C in
> the figures ..."; my initial read confused me due to the other rounded
> shapes in the diagram.

Fixed, thanks.


> Page 3 links to http://erights.org/download/horton/, which says "[...]
> operate in a distributed fashion, but we have not yet been tested this."
> -> "we have not yet tested this".

Fixed.


> Perhaps on Page 2, where you're beginning your descriptions of the
> figures, you should explicitly state that the rectangles are just labels.

Fixed.


> Other than that, I think it's good. This is the first time I've actually
> sat down and tried to understand Horton, and I think I've got it.

Wonderful!



> Figure 2 might be confusing for someone not familiar with promises due
> to the apparently concurrent invocation of foo and intro. I'm not sure
> if it warrants mentioning/describing a future/promise though.

I did not find anything economical to do about this.


> Once this round of on-list review is complete, perhaps a posting to LTU
> [1] to solicit feedback from general programming language enthusiasts
> might help as well.
> 
> [1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

Done, but didn't help.


Thanks again!


-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM