Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!sri-unix!garth!smryan From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Partial application in C Message-ID: <807@garth.UUCP> Date: 25 Jun 88 20:04:07 GMT References: <3353@cognos.UUCP> <619@goofy.megatest.UUCP> Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA Lines: 17 >I began to wonder why such a restriction might be deemed necessary. >Was it Big Brother engineering? -- Thou shalt not modify thy >executable, for it is a Bad Thing. -- Or is there a valid technical >reason behind it? Most any system with page/segment descriptors allows execute only or read only memory. - Increased the address space for a PDP-11. - Trashing data with a bad pointer is hard enough to track down; trashing code is even worse. - If code cannot be modify, the system can safely and aggressively cache it. The operating system should provide a way to move pages between data and instruction space during execution.