Subject: Re: Paul Graham describes his new Lisp dialect, "Arc"
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 03:24:25 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3216079463684556@naggum.net>

* cbbrowne@acm.org
| This is NOT a case where there's significant chance of anything
| "seriously damaging."

  Are you kidding me?

| All we're talking about is the possibility of typing in:
| 
| % public_html
| 
| and having the shell figure out that:
|   - Since there aren't any programs in $PATH by that name, and
|   - Since there _is_ a directory under $PWD called public_html,
| it would be slick to transform that into:
| % cd public_html

  What if this was the case yesterday, but today, somebody put a program in
  one of the directories in PATH named "public_html" which did something
  that you did not want at all?

| There certainly are misfeatures out there that could result in "severe
| mischief," adding in the _possibility_ of "Oh, my stars!  We went to a
| subdirectory!  Oh, the humanity..." does not seem like massive disaster.

  If you want to achieve system security, you have to stop ridiculing the
  professional paranoia that security people have to engage in.

///
-- 
  The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture
  has taught you.  Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are
  more important to you than those in your past ever will be.  The world is
  changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.