The Joy of Java

[Simon Spero]

On Sat, 27 Apr 1996, Marianne Mueller wrote:

> But let's not have a food fight.  Although entertaining in the short term,

I don't owe you anything! I don't owe you anything! Oh, food fight.

> reasonably secure way, on the internet, using Java.  We're working on a
> response to the Felten el al. paper, which will be posted to the net
> shortly.  I think some of their points are perfectly valid, some of their
> points are irrelevant, and a lot of the presentation is melodramatic. 

Most of the emphasis in the paper seems to be on the lack of a 
denotational semantics for java and the java VM, and on the lack of a 
formally defined set of rules for type inferencing rules. 

For security purposes, java-the-language is not particularly important; 
it's the VM code that counts. This is a shame, as it's pretty easy to 
come up with a reasonably clean denotation for java, wheras the byte code 
gets pretty messy. It would probably be easier to get a cleaner semantics 
if you define a set of rules to transform the byte code into an alternate 
form and then define the denotational semantics for that. The paper 
mentions  that the authors believe the VM to be unsuitable for a 
denotational semantics, but the issue is not explored to any great depth. 

> Melodrama is good for sound bites, I guess. 

I take it twenty minutes before I go to sleep; seems to work pretty well.


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