On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 01:00:33PM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
We all agree that critical errors like this should be caught; the only
question is at what layer the action should take place. I'm an
adherent to the Unix philosophy -- when a decision is made at a lower
level, it takes away
James A. Donald wrote:
The correct mechanism is exception handling.
Yes, I reckon there is a pretty wide consensus that exceptions
provide a satisfactory solution to the sort of problems being
discussed in this thread.
If caller has provided a mechanism to handle the failure, that
mechanism
On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:00:33 -0500, Steven M Bellovin said:
Let me suggest a C-compatible possibility: pass an extra parameter to
the library routines, specifying a procedure to call if serious errors
occur. If that pointer is null, the library can abort.
I agree. However the case at hand
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Werner Koch writes:
On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:00:33 -0500, Steven M Bellovin said:
Let me suggest a C-compatible possibility: pass an extra parameter to
the library routines, specifying a procedure to call if serious errors
occur. If that pointer is null, the
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 765 February14, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and
Davide Castelvecchi
ATTACK OF THE TELECLONES: Should quantum
--
John Denker wrote:
Halting on every exceptional condition is like amputating to cure
every headache.
Keep in mind Dykstra's dictum: testing can perhaps show the
presence of bugs, but testing can never show the absence of bugs.
For truly critical applications, and I have written one
John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Despite a bunch of PC graphics chips and boards having announced HDCP
support, according to the above article, it turns out that none of them will
actually work. It looks like something slipped somewhere, and an extra
crypto-key chip needed to be added to
On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:53:39 -0500, John Denker said:
It is straightforward but laborious to simulate exception-throwing
in C:
extern int errno;
/* try some stuff */
if (errno) return; /* return immediately on any error */
Except that this does not work. ERRNO gets set
According to the BBC, the British government is talking to Microsoft
about putting in a back door for the file encryption mechanisms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4713018.stm
--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James A. Donald writes:
--
Libgcrypt tries to minimize these coding errors; for example there
are no error returns for the RNG - if one calls for 16 bytes of
random one can be sure that the buffer is filled with 16 bytes of
random.
Werner Koch wrote:
On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 03:07:26 -0500, John Denker said:
Again, enough false dichotomies already! Just because error codes
are open to abuse doesn't mean exiting is the correct thing to do.
For Libgcrypt's usage patterns I am still convinced that it is the
right decision.
--
John Denker wrote:
Whatever happened to doing what's best for the customer? Doing
what's most convenient for the programmer during testing, while
making things worse for the customer during deployment ... that
seems remarkably unprofessional.
It is usually better for the customer
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