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.