> she thought it's like a cook book with an end and she kept going > because she wanted to get an overview.
She is right about that. It is a cook book and it is finite at any given time. But it is also huge and growing. Depending on her processing speed, she can parse it to the end (at that time) or might end up parsing "forever" because of new recipes getting added faster than she parses the old ones. Another case would be a Service, that generates new recipes as requested. I imagine an arts project or expert system, that starts with simple recipes and a huge set of rules and then generates increasingly complex N-course-meals of more or less exotic (and tasty) dishes. You would certainly sometime reach the 10-course-meal (and most likely be bored to death at that time). But if the ingredient database is big enough that would take really long. Such a service would in fact provide an infinite stream of meals (of decreasing practicality as N growths). In the context of langsec, the former and the latter cases are examples for real world data streams that have to be processed (for the latter you may assume a log line stream instead). Obviously, they are regularly processed by splitting them into independent chunks (in this cases single recipes or meals). But if someone would sends a recipe or log line of infinite length, the chunk would be of infinite length. So there have to be enforced limits or the parse buffer would flow over. And (at least in most humans) there are! She did not parse until the end before interupting the process and doing something else. She most likely will not parse "forever" if she encounteres an infinite or way too long stream. And the same probably is valid for single recipes. If she would encounter a recipe with a way too long list of ingredients - most probably she would abort parsing and discard that recipe. Every parser needs to limit input chunk size even when the expected stream length is infinite because processing memory is never infinite. And a lot of real world applications also need to limit stream lengths too. Seems all obvious at first. But a look at all the buffer overflows out there - that shows that it oviously is not... :( But you might be glad, that your mother did not overflow while parsing that looooong stream (that of course is long). ;) -- Allan Wegan Jabber: allanwe...@erdor.de ICQ: 209459114
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ langsec-discuss mailing list langsec-discuss@mail.langsec.org https://mail.langsec.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/langsec-discuss
