[DNG] OT: Algol w, 68, Pascal, Ada

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 06:32:38AM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 03/07/2016 23:17, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
> >On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 01:36:14PM -0400, Peter Olson wrote:
> >
> >>Can I download your compiler that fixes all my mistakes?  I could really 
> >>use such a tool.
> >Yes, as a matter of fat you can -- almost.
> >
> >Two languages I use have the property that once the program gets
> >through the compiler, almost all the bugs are gone.
> >
> >Modula 3.
> >OCaml.
> >
> >Algol 68 is another one, but Algol 68 compilers are as scarce as hen's
> >teeth nowdays.
> >
> >
> Ada also. BTW, Ada is considered a descendant of Pascal, which is a
> descendant of Algol68 :-)

More a relative.  Wirth made a proposal for a language, van Wijngaarden 
made a proposal for a defining formalism.  Algol 68 was the result of 
merging the language ideas with the formalism, generalising wherever 
that worked, and imposing orthogonal design principles to simplify 
everytthing conceptually.

Wirth was sufficienly upset with the result that he implemented a 
variant of his original design, quickly, acoiding whatever was tricky 
to implement, and called it Algol W.  He made all caracter strings 
fixed-length (which ws diffeent from his original proposal.  Later 
he made Pascal.  I'd call Pascal a descendant of Algol W rather than of 
Algol 68.  Pascal had an easier syntax to parse, simpler parameter 
passing conventions, and required array sizes to be statically 
determined,

It ignored most of the new ideas introduced by Algol 68.

> Ada is generally used when human life is at stake - planes, rockets, air
> traffic control, automatic vehicles.

Ada resembled Pascal syntactically, but had very different semantics.  
For one thing, it was type-safe.  Pascal wasn't.  I'm not sure 
I'd really call it a descendant.

-- hendrik
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Re: [DNG] Studying C as told. (For help)

[Rainer Weikusat]

Didier Kryn  writes:
> Le 03/07/2016 23:17, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
>> On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 01:36:14PM -0400, Peter Olson wrote:
>>
>>> Can I download your compiler that fixes all my mistakes?  I could really 
>>> use such a tool.
>> Yes, as a matter of fat you can -- almost.
>>
>> Two languages I use have the property that once the program gets
>> through the compiler, almost all the bugs are gone.
>>
>> Modula 3.
>> OCaml.
>>
>> Algol 68 is another one, but lgol 68 compilers are as scarce as hen's
>> teeth nowdays.
>>
>>
> Ada also.

That's why Ada has been used successfully for the most sensational
fireworks:

https://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane5rep.html
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Re: [DNG] OT: Intel SMM exploit

[dev1fanboy]

Ok, so this looks pretty serious. Specific processors or all intels?

Cheers,

chillfan

On Sunday, July 3, 2016 5:41 PM, Florian Zieboll  wrote:
> Hallo list,
> 
> just for the case you didn't read it yet: Intel's "ring -2" System
> Management Mode is starting to disintegrate.
> 
> Lenovo Security Advisory:  LEN-8324
> Potential Impact:  Execution of code in SMM by an attacker with local
> administrative access
> Severity:  High
> Scope of Impact: Industry-wide
> 
> Money Quote:
> 
> | Importantly, because Lenovo did not develop the vulnerable SMM code
> | and is still in the process of determining the identity of the
> | original author, it does not know its originally intended purpose.
> 
> https://support.lenovo.com/de/en/solutions/LEN-8324
> 
> http://blog.cr4.sh/2016/06/exploring-and-exploiting-lenovo.html
> https://github.com/Cr4sh/ThinkPwn
> 
> 
> libre Grüße,
> 
> Florian
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Re: [DNG] inittab question

[emninger]

Am Mon, 04 Jul 2016 12:00:01 +
schrieb KatolaZ :

> uh? Why would have you expected that? First of all, you normally don't
> want getty in runlevel 1, which is used for single-user mode.

Because i knew that to be such from slackware (which also has
single mode user runlevel = 1 ) ... ;)

> Second, even if you insist in having getty in runlevel 1, why have 6
> of them if that runlevel is normally used only for rescue-related
> tasks? Third, the number of ttys active in each runlevel is not a
> gospel line but a configurable option. Fourth, the configuration of
> virtual consoles would have nothing to do with any problem with your
> (graphical?) login manager, so you are probably looking into the
> wrong file.

I looked into it, because the loginmanagers failed if i did not set them
specifically to VT1 (which for me was possible only with lxdm). Ok, i'm
not really linux knowledged so, i thought there might be something
wrong (eventually due to the complicated installation i had) when i
compared it to my previous slackware setup. 

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[DNG] OT: OCaml and Modula 3

[Hendrik Boom]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2016 at 07:24:04PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Jul 2016 17:17:35 -0400
> Hendrik Boom  wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 01:36:14PM -0400, Peter Olson wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Can I download your compiler that fixes all my mistakes?  I could
> > > really use such a tool.  
> > 
> > Yes, as a matter of fat you can -- almost.
> > 
> > Two languages I use have the property that once the program gets 
> > through the compiler, almost all the bugs are gone.
> > 
> > Modula 3.
> > OCaml.
> 
> OFFLIST
> 
> Hi Hendrick,
> 
> Does either have addon libraries for things like GUI, XML, and YAML? Do
> both have a command to run a shellscript, like fork(), exec(),
> system()? Do you use either of them a lot? Which do you use more? Do
> you like them? Which do you like more?

I haven't investigated its libraries much, ans still feel very much 
like a beginner with OCaml, but at least one OCaml program I 
use does use a UI library; I think GTK.  It makes graphical 
representations of history graphs in the monotone revision control 
system.

OCaml does have an XML reading library; in fact there's an Oaml 
variant with extra syntax for queries to an XML database.
Unfortunately it lacks a relational join.
Not familiar with YAML at all.

fork() et al?  See 
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libunix.html
for the whole list.

The package manager for OCaml source packages is OPAM.  (in fact, on 
Debian the recommended way to install ocaml seems to be to install 
opam.  THe command opam -a gives a list for all the packages available 
for your current version of ocaml.  I tried it and got a list of 7172 
lines, eash a one-line package description.

Unfortunately, the list of packages is not well curated, and I've had 
trouble using the more obscure ones.

> Is either used by real people to do real things? I thought I heard that
> to be a modern Wall Street Whiz Kid today you need to learn OCaml.

Yes.  I believe the company that's most involved in the use and 
development of OCaml is OCaml is Jane Street.  I suspect it's because 
mistakes in their code can easily be very, very expensive.

OCaml is a statically typed language that figures out the types by 
sophisticated reasoning.  This leads to an (I think deplorable) style 
whereby the programmer usually doesn't specify types and llsts the 
system figure them out.  Of course you *can* specify types explicitly 
whenever you care to; its just that lazy programmers don't. making 
their code less than readable.

I find OCaml insufficiently wordy.

> 
> Back in another lifetime, I was a professional Pascal programmer. Not
> Borland Pascal, real Pascal that wouldn't let you do anything. I didn't
> appreciate the restrictions, but I sure appreciated the heads-up every
> time I was about to do something stupid.

I've used it.  At the time, the language looked as if it would allow 
you to think in high-level concepts, but when you actually ggot to an 
implementation, everything was restrictd so you had to thin in macine 
terms.  For example, on the original and canonical implementatino onf 
the CDC 6000 series, you couldn't have a set of characters because 
there were 64 characters avilable and the machine had a 60-bit machine 
word.

Modula 3 is based on Modula 2, but it is not a Wirth-designed language, 
and it does not share its restrictions.  It has  a full panoply of 
ordinary features, such as dynamic arrays, records, and so foth, and 
it also has a full set of object-oriented stuff.  The object stuff in 
independent of the module structure.

Modula 3 has been used to write an operating system (called SPIN).  
It is a full-fledged systems language.

It is type-safe (unless you explicitly use UNSAFE features (and you 
have to use the keyword UNSAFE for this), and has a garbage collector.  
malloc and free-style memory allocation is availale if you need it, but 
it is UNSAFE.

But it seems to be in decline these days, undeservedly so.

I find it (like Pascal) excessively wordy.

-- hendrik
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Re: [DNG] inittab question

[KatolaZ]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 08:39:38AM +0200, emnin...@riseup.net wrote:

[cut]

> 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
> 2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
> 3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
> 4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
> 5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
> 6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
> ---
> 
> Is that correct?
> 
> I'd have expected any line to be:
> 
> ---
> 1:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
> 2:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
> ...

uh? Why would have you expected that? First of all, you normally don't
want getty in runlevel 1, which is used for single-user mode. Second,
even if you insist in having getty in runlevel 1, why have 6 of them
if that runlevel is normally used only for rescue-related tasks?
Third, the number of ttys active in each runlevel is not a gospel line
but a configurable option. Fourth, the configuration of virtual
consoles would have nothing to do with any problem with your
(graphical?) login manager, so you are probably looking into the
wrong file.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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Re: [DNG] inittab question

[Simon Hobson]

emnin...@riseup.net wrote:

> Dealing with a login (manager) problem, i looked into my /etc/inittab
> and i found this:
> 
> ---
> # Note that on most Debian systems tty7 is used by the X Window System,
> # so if you want to add more getty's go ahead but skip tty7 if you run
> X. #
> 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
> 2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
> 3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
> 4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
> 5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
> 6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
> ---
> 
> Is that correct?
> 
> I'd have expected any line to be:
> 
> ---
> 1:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
> 2:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
> ...

Yes, on Debian the default runlevel is 2, and that's how they set the console 
logins. I guess they reckon that if anyone wants to use the other runlevels 
then they'll have enough knowledge to adjust this as required. No idea why they 
don't just set them all as 2345 - that's probably one of those "someone knew, 
eons ago - and it probably seemed like a good idea at the time" things.

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[DNG] inittab question

[emninger]

Hi!

Dealing with a login (manager) problem, i looked into my /etc/inittab
and i found this:

---
# Note that on most Debian systems tty7 is used by the X Window System,
# so if you want to add more getty's go ahead but skip tty7 if you run
X. #
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
---

Is that correct?

I'd have expected any line to be:

---
1:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
...
---

Thanks in advance for any pointer!
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