this will be my last message on this topic as I need to stop reading this list for a few months. Alastair Reid writes:
A potential difference (which Richard Uhtenwoldt hints at) is that it can be hard to control the flow of OS capabilities as the capability is passed from one process to another to another. This gets especially tricky when you want policies like 'X can either read files or use the network but not both' (so X cannot leak secrets learnt from the filesystem). I think this is why capability OSs have fallen out of favour in the OS community. I suspect that typesystems are better able to express and enforce these policies.
A "once" of a function is a use-once version of that function. Ie, "once(func)" returns a object that will forward no more than one "run" message to "func". The two argument form "once(verb, target)" is a generalization which will forward no more than one "verb" message to the target.
For the Miranda Methods, the result of the once (the forwarder below) must make good decisions about whether to override them and possibly forward them, or not override them and let them default to methods on the forwarder. For non-Miranda methods other than the suppressed method, they are simply forwarded.
def once { to (verb, target) :any { var used := false def forwarder { # use the Miranda order/3, though it shouldn't matter
# use the Miranda optSealedDispatch/1 to protect the target
# forward getAllegedType/0, though one could argue that, once # used up, the type shouldn't include the supressed verb to getAllegedType() :any { target getAllegedType() }
# forward respondsTo, but supress verb. One could argue that res
seems to me capabilities can do that: you just pass to X a capability (pointer) to an object that will return either a read-only capability to the filesystem or a capability to the network inferface but not both. either that or use the revocable-capability pattern twice in such a way that before the first network access happens, the filesystem capability is revoked and before the first filesystem read happens the network access capability is revoked. to flesh out that first alternative a little, the object passed to X could probably be coded up by modifying the following E language function (found at http://www.erights.org/elang/concurrency/race.html) for making "use-once" capabilities. and yes I realize this code is not exactly the essence of conciseness and brevity. pondsTo
# and getAllegedType() should be consistent with each other. to respondsTo(verb2, arity) :boolean { verb != verb2 && target respondsTo(verb2, arity) }
# forward printOn/1 to printOn(out) { target printOn(out) }
# forward reactToLostClient to reactToLostClient(problem) { target reactToLostClient(problem) }
# use the Miranda whenMoreResolved/1 to protect the target
# use the Miranda whenBroken/1 to protect the target
# use the Miranda yourself/0 to protect the target
# handle all other messages match [verb2, args] { if (verb == verb2) { if (used) { throw("used up") } used := true } E call(target, verb2, args) } } }
# default to suppressing "run" to (target) :any { once("run", target) } }
what follows is not so much an explanation as a series of disconnected points that a bright and motivated reader might infer real knowledge from. point 1. I observe that type-systems work is very abstract and formal and if I were doing a type system for secure programming I would definitely look to the capability literature for conceptual guidance. too easy when doing formal work to lose sight of where the juicy "wins" (opportunities) lie and more generally to lose sight of the economic and social implications of the technical work and to start playing a sterile "glass bead game". insight and vision is where the capability literature is very fertile. here I'm speaking of the capability PL literature (much of which is ultimately based on Hewitt) not the older capability OS literature (eg Butler Lampson's paper from the early 1970s) which is all intertwined with hairy OS implementation issues and takes forever to learn, it seems to this languages geek. point 2. Alastair Reid writes:
I now think the body of ideas around capability PLs (again mostly dynamically-typed OOPLs these days) is likely to be richer and more scientifically fertile for the long term than FP even.
Can you say more about why you think OOP works better in this regard? Is it because:
- the only way to act on them is via methods (I'm ignoring most C++ features and public Java fields here)
that is one of the things I like. on the E language list they say that certain languages have the AYCDISAM -- All You Can Do Is Send A Message -- property, which means you can always interpose a new object of arbitary behaviour between any two extant objects --a next level of modularity beyond the ADT. many capability PLs have the AYCDISAM property. the question comes up under AYCDISAM of how can you ever be sure you are talking to the real Bank of America (say) when there can be an arbitrary number of objects on the Network between you and the thing you think is the Bank of America object. note that simply asking a third object, eg, the Federal Reserve object, simply moves the problem. the solution is all elegant and subtle. in fact, ISTR it took bright folk years to figure out. "took years to figure out" is a big turn off to practical programmers, but to me, who would rather be a theoretical physicist than a programmer except programming is more economically important, it is a reccommendation when I can learn relatively few very subtle concepts (of the quality that they took years for a bright group to figure out) rather than many many many tedious uninspiring ungeneralizable details as in say most Linux software. point 3. I judge that it would be much easier (than say Linux) to be the system administrator of a complex "software environment" written to capability principles. you have more control over the environment because each individual software package (each of which is a kind of "guest of the system admin") has less control. for more see http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/Politics.html point 4. the intellectual framework that underlies much of the capability PLs --Hewitt's Actors model -- is protean enough so that people have written articles that "redo" much of *physics* in Actors terminology and primitives. such protean-ness speaks well for fertility. in summary, I plan to keep on concentrating on the pure FP world because I calculate that it is more certain to gain (slowly: FP is not the Internet of 1993 by a long shot) in economic importance than the capability PL world is. the capability (PL and OS) stuff is either going to explode or remain obscure with obsure being the more likely fate next 6 years, and that makes for unreliable career planning. oh how cynical I have become! -- Richard Uhtenwoldt "It's a mammal thing; you wouldn't understand."