[PRL] Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

Paul A. Steckler steck at stecksoft.com
Wed May 11 13:46:52 EDT 2005


> Interesting reading...  I smell types...  Of course the PLT naming 
> conventions are very much in tune with what he's thinking.

And types are redolent of flow analysis.

Here's another way to distinguish his XSS-unsafe and safe strings.  Have
MrFlow seed an "XSS-unsafe" attribute where Request is called, and let
that flow along with the "string" type.  Adding the ability to tag
types with programmer-defined attributes should be straightforward.
You might even specify an algebra of attributes so that they could be
combined where multiple attributes flow together.  You might use
flow-time contracts to indicate whether your attributes are doing what
you expect.

-- Paul



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