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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1996-04-30 - Re: The Joy of Java

Header Data

From: Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>
To: Marianne Mueller <mrm@netcom.com>
Message Hash: 9f8611a067e11b80380fb0d1a55d392eafb9e761c243389e217c7d658708dd1d
Message ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960429103500.346C-100000@chivalry>
Reply To: <199604272232.PAA00806@netcom20.netcom.com>
UTC Datetime: 1996-04-30 04:09:47 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 12:09:47 +0800

Raw message

From: Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 12:09:47 +0800
To: Marianne Mueller <mrm@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: The Joy of Java
In-Reply-To: <199604272232.PAA00806@netcom20.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960429103500.346C-100000@chivalry>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Sat, 27 Apr 1996, Marianne Mueller wrote:

> But let's not have a food fight.  Although entertaining in the short term,

I don't owe you anything! I don't owe you anything! Oh, food fight.

> reasonably secure way, on the internet, using Java.  We're working on a
> response to the Felten el al. paper, which will be posted to the net
> shortly.  I think some of their points are perfectly valid, some of their
> points are irrelevant, and a lot of the presentation is melodramatic. 

Most of the emphasis in the paper seems to be on the lack of a 
denotational semantics for java and the java VM, and on the lack of a 
formally defined set of rules for type inferencing rules. 

For security purposes, java-the-language is not particularly important; 
it's the VM code that counts. This is a shame, as it's pretty easy to 
come up with a reasonably clean denotation for java, wheras the byte code 
gets pretty messy. It would probably be easier to get a cleaner semantics 
if you define a set of rules to transform the byte code into an alternate 
form and then define the denotational semantics for that. The paper 
mentions  that the authors believe the VM to be unsuitable for a 
denotational semantics, but the issue is not explored to any great depth. 

> Melodrama is good for sound bites, I guess. 

I take it twenty minutes before I go to sleep; seems to work pretty well.


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