Re: Privilege-escalation attacks on NT-based Windows are unfixable

From: Alan J. Flavell (flavell@mail.cern.ch)
Date: 08/24/02 

From: "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.cern.ch>
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2002 14:30:29 +0200

On Aug 24, Lassi Hippeläinen inscribed on the eternal scroll:

> If the strings contained their own length value, they would be
> _objects_. Unfortunately C was born before object-oriented programming
> was developed to a well defined dicipline.

Might I draw your attention to BCPL? Google suggests a manual dated
1967 - http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bcpl.html (mine is a wad
of lineprinter paper ;-)

As you will see from section 4.2, strings were represented by packing
the string length first, followed by the character string itself.

(I'm no specialist on computer languages - as a graduate student in
physics around that time I was using FORTRAN2, though I grew rather
fond of BCPL - but I seem to recall a certain astonishment when I
later found out how it was done in C).

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