[E-Lang] Re: Old Security Myths Continue to Mislead

[Ken Kahn]

MarkM wrote:
>
> I'd just like to clarify that MarcS's second reference is the accurate
one.
> The question is not about C# itself but about the underlying vm.  Is this
> identical to the ".net" vm?
>

C# like many other languages (including VB, Cobol, Eiffel, Fortran, Perl,
Python, Smalltalk, ML, Haskell, Oberon) compiles to Microsoft Intermediate
Language (MSIL) that is run using the CLR (Common Language Runtime).

In the August issue of IEEE Computer is a well-written overview of  .NET
written by Bertrand Meyer (of Eiffel fame). There is even a column devoted
to security with headings "type verification", "origin verification", "a
fine-grained permission mechanism", and "a notion of 'principal'.

I'd love to hear what some of you think of all this.

Best,

-ken

P.S. Also I had thought that Oz was to be on the list of .NET languages and
a search turned up

http://www.mozart-oz.org/lists/oz-users/0313.html

Here's a very interesting excerpt from that page:
We - the Programming Systems Lab at the University of Saarland,
part of the Mozart Consortium -, have indeed received funding
from Microsoft in the context of an effort called "Project 7",
which involves programming language researchers from all over
the world. Somebody mentioned Mercury before, and probably
meant the following web page, which describes Project 7 and
Mercury for .NET (and mentions Oz):



http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/information/dotnet/mercury_and_dotne
t.html


Due to our research interests, and to focus our efforts in
evaluating and striving to improve the potential of .NET for
high-level languages, we decided to not port Oz, but a new
language which we currently have in development, called Alice.
Picture Alice as a statically dialect of Oz, in that it
integrates major features of Oz for open programming with
Standard ML - for instance futures, threads, dynamically
linked libraries, pickling, and distribution. Alice is
intended as a new research vehicle on open programming,
while its implementation also targets programming language
teaching.


A running prototype of Alice for .NET (though still lacking
some features), has been presented at Microsoft's Professional
Developers Conference (PDC) in July 2000 in Orlando, where
Microsoft publicly disclosed the .NET strategy. I can provide
more information about Alice on demand, but I'll respect this
list as a forum for discussing about Oz and Mozart ;-)