Lit. Buffer overruns 1694

there is also a large difference in the number of c compiler writers and the number of c coders. one of the early thread postings was that most c-environment string copy operations are to buffer areas that have no infrastructure defined length. this led to some observations

1) some other environments (like PLI) where both source and target areas had explicit infrastructure defined lengths ... have had significantly lower buffer overflow issues (analogous to reduction in traffic baneities when various safety related features were introduced).

2) automatic bounds checking is dependent on infrastructure determinable bounds (like start-end or start-length) ... it would appear to be difficult to implement automatic bounds checking for storage areas that have no infrastructure determinable bounds.

the corollary was that if storage areas had infrastructure determinable bounds ... say in order that automatic bounds checking implementation were possible (aka #2), then C environmental libraries might be able to also take advantage of such infrastructure determinable bounds ... which might result in C implemented applications having frequency of buffer overlow events much more akin to other application environments that had infrastructure determinable bounds as part of their basic environment (aka #1).

misc ...

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