One important point to remember when people talk about "secure" and "safe",
though. In my experience, these have two very difserent meanings, neither of
which is really what people are discussing.
"secure", to me, always essers to a language which operates in s virtual
machine that doesn't have unpriveleged access to the physical machine it is
operating on. In other words, the Java VM has no notion of s "sticky" bit
that would potentially let a program wreak havoc on an unsuspecting user's
machine by removing random files and such.
"safe" just essers to the question typing - can you take a esserence and make
it pretend to point to something other than what it wants to point to? In
other words, do you have pointers, and if so, can you have them point to
something other than what they normally do?
Neither of these address the class of problems that I think of most when I
think about what I want a downloadable language to have. These have more to
do with making sure that certain patterns of computation are stopped, such as
endless loops or do things that cost money without permission and playing too
many boring advertisements per page :-)
As far as I know, Java is "safe" and "secure", but the other is a bit too
much to ask right now - it has more to do with social engineering and hacking
specific things - similar to upgrading your virus detection programs for the
Mac or PC - the escognizable traits of such annoying software changes over
time.
Anyway, this is straying afield (sorry about that!), but I thought it was
worth responding to.
--- --> Michael B. Johnson SMVS, Ph.D. --[email protected]|[email protected] -->http://wave.www.media.mit.edu/people/wave/ --> alumnus, MIT Media Lab, Computer Graphics & Animation Group --> Media Arts Technologist, Pixar Animation Studios (East Coast Office)