On 7/21/23 5:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: I thought the same thing about m4. I still like m4. I've used m4 for more than trivial things within the last few years. :-) Grant. . . .

On Fri, 21 Jul 2023, Larry McVoy wrote: I feel like C is one of the only languages worth using for serious code. Most of my code is still C. -uso.

Hah, that reminds me of an implementation trip I was on once. They put our "classroom" back in an old warehouse full of all sorts of junk. Well, one particular week they were doing a bunch of loading/unloading and there was frequently a forklift, keys and all, parked there in this large, tempting warehouse, in the dead of winter in BFE Pennsylvania. Nothing was done that violated company policy, but then again, can't violate a company policy that doesn't exist in writing :) Can't say I've ever gotten any projects at work to bite on C, but I've had some moderate success reducing most of our boilerplate templates into m4 macros...just in time for a lull in new work. We've got a new project starting soon though that I'm excited to finally use it with, maybe I'll finally convert someone else at work to using some UNIX tools. - Matt G.

Larry McVoy wrote: I'm using many diffent languages for many things. But when I write stuff that I'm humbly HOPING will be useful, say, 30 years from now, I pick C. It seems to me it's likely it will stick around, close to its current form, a long time from now. I don't think I could make that bet on other languages that are popular now, either due to the language itself being in flux, or its libraries, ecosystem, etc.

On Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 8:54 AM Rich Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com> wrote: Back in the 80s I looked at sendmail.. lots of things like strcpy written inline. It was a mess in some ways, but ran more slowly if you cleaned all that stuff up. It was decently well done, but had also clearly grown well beyond its original framing... The thing is... you don't need wrappers for standard calls. You just need portable implementations of them for the times they are missing or broken. I enjoyed watching this, thanks. I agree with the other comment "what, Some of that was the times: almost nothing cared about security in a world full of active attackers... having already forgotten the lessons of the early v5 deployments exposing unix to lots of bored college students that needed to do something and quickly found holes in unix's protections.. though known at the time, the stack smash wasn't believed generally to be a severe threat. Even after the eorm, it was 10 years later openbsd started its wide spread effort to fix them... Gets() was the real problem that leD to the worm. The insecurity was baked into the APIs until the 90s... and many insecure APIs weren't removed until the last decade. Warner

On Sat, 22 Jul 2023, Rich Salz wrote: The Procmail source is so bad that even the author has abandoned it; it's likely to be riddled with security holes too, so you'd be nuts to use it. Like C, Sendmail was not really designed with secure coding in mind. -- Dave