From: Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>
Date: 2002-04-12T02:56:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Is eval a code/design smell?

On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 13:50, Paul Brannan wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 02:34:29AM +0900, Alan Chen wrote:
> > Note that C++ has the friend keyword that does something similiar. Its
> > just with ruby you always have friends ;).  Last time I looked, Python had 
> > a similiar "security bug" via __dict__.
> 
> The difference is that with C++, friends have to be declared by the
> class (Bar cannot declare himself to be Foo's friend; Foo must declare
> Bar to be his friend).
> 
> One "security bug" that C++ has is that you can simply do:
>   #define private public
>   #include "Foo.hpp"
> 
> but I think this has undefined behavior.  You can probably do something
> similar with friend, though it would be trickier.

Of course, with C++, you do directly access any byte in memory owned by
the program you want, so things like public/private/friend are simply
there as "safety" checks - not any kind of true protection or security
mechanism.



> 
> Paul
>