Jeff Shannon wrote:
snip
Because you cannot make Python secure against a malicious (or ignorant) user -- there's too much flexibility to be able to guard against every possible way in which user-code could harm the system. Parsing your own (limited) scripting language allows much better control over what user-code is capable of doing, and therefore allows (at least some measure of) security against malicious code.
I don't see how that would equate to something that the original programmer should be concerned about. You could include a bit in your licensing scheme that voids all support on code that has been modified in any way. You shouldn't be obligated and no one expects you to support something the end-user has mucked with.
You could trivially enforce this by keeping checksums of all the system files.
In any case, there's nothing you can really do to "secure" your code. This is true of any language, C, C++, and especially scripting languages like Python. Anyone who has the determination get at and modify the code probably will.
The only time where I can see someone using another language in place of Python for a scripting language is just domain-specific factors, e.g. if you need the extension language to be easily used non-programmers.
Just a thought.
-- Orlando Vazquez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
