Re: tmpnam(e)

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> As far as I can tell, the lua tradition seems to be to expose the
> functionality of the ISO C libraries without much regard for whether
> they are safe or not.  That is, not only are unsafe features exposed (EG
> tmpnam and acos), but no attempt is made to make them safe.
>
> acos is another example: On a system I use lua on, the epxression
> "acos(2)" dumps core.

There's a difference here: tmpnam *cannot* be used in a secure way in
general. acos can. Further, most systems allow the floating-point exception
behaviour to be specified, and C'99 standardises this behaviour.

> I think this is a desirable state of affairs in that by following this
> policy lua inherits the behaviour of the underlying system (for the
> alternative see Common Lisp).

I agree. But features of ISO C such as gets and tmpnam that are inherently
unsafe should simply not be exposed: they're broken.

> tmpnam is not always unsafe, the programmer may be using it in an
> embedded system with only one application running.  It would then seem
> petty to prevent the programmer from using it.

If you're using an ANSI function in a non-portable way, you shouldn't be
using an ANSI function.

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | certain, a.  insufficiently analysed