[Haskell-cafe] Re: A suggestion for the next high profile Haskell project [Was: Re: What is a hacker?]

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 12:14:36AM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Magnus Therning schrieb:
> >There is of course the possibility that Haskell would bring a whole slew
> >of yet-to-be-determined security issues.  I doubt it will be worse than
> >C though.
> 
> Haskell might be prone to denial-of-service attacks. E.g. sending it 
> data that cause it to evaluate an infinite data structure.

That would be a bug in the implementation of an algorithm, not an
inherent Haskell problem.

> Still, I'd want to have the results of a strictness analysis attached to 
> Haskell software.

Why? In case the strictness analyzer was buggy?

> Then again, avoiding global state and using a language with garbage 
> collection, a strong type discipline and checked pointer dereferencing 
> (say: Java, Ruby, Python, whatever) would probably go a far way towards 
> safer software, even if it's not an FPL.

But implementing deeply mathematical concepts in a mathematically
oriented language (like Haskell) seems to be a better idea, if
only to make the implementation closer to specification.

Best regards
Tomasz