[E-Lang] what is good about E?

[Karp, Alan]

Richard U. wrote:
> 
> What finally got me excited about cap (a month ago) was my realizing
> that cap techniques actually remove the obligation for the 
> programmer to
> do much of the tedious thinking about security --and the resulting
> "combinatorial code explosion"-- that Unix and Java 
> developers of secure
> apps are forced to do.
> 

This is what I liked about capabilities for distributed systems; I could
separate the specification of security policy, who gets what capability,
from resource access, what requests should be honored.  With capabilities an
object only needs to know if the right capability was presented, not how the
presenter got the capability.  A completely separate mechanism, one that can
change without affecting the code for my object, can dish out caps to
authorized users.  (I know, I know, the processes under the control of users
:)

Also, even though it's been mentioned in passing in this thread, I find the
absence of deadlocks to be a major reason to use E.  Security is nice, but
completely removing the ability to express an entire class of errors is a
very attractive feature, a point not highlighted enough in marketing E IMHO.


_________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Decision Technology Department
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories MS 1U-3
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-6278
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp/