[Info-vax] A DCL wish list of sorts...

[Simon Clubley]

On 2019-03-22, pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com <pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, March 22, 2019 at 3:58:20 AM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> As long as it is not documented to work (I don't think that it is), it 
>> should be fixed.  Otherwise, one could fix no bugs at all, since someone 
>> might rely on the undocumented, wrong behaviour.
>
> I agree in principle, but programming languages are a bit different in this regard. In this case, the behavior is not wrong; it is arguably a shortcut. But I would be in favor of fixing it if it isn't explicitly documented.
>

I would call it undefined behaviour and undefined behaviour is subject
to change as compilers and languages evolve.

> Another interesting quoting example was the command definition compiler before I rewrote it for V2.x. It allowed arbitrary unquoted strings in certain places in the syntax of the command definition statements. I had to support that in the new compiler even though the official syntax now required quotes. Therein lies a tale.
>

Are you able to share the tale ?

I don't know how similar the V2.x compiler was to the V4.x compiler
but certainly in current versions there were other little issues I
found in addition to the vulnerability itself.

> Fortunately, people designing programming languages are now stricter in their specification of the lexical and syntactic elements. Well, except for Perl.
>

Which is something I strongly approve of.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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