Partial application in C

[Steven Ryan]

>I began to wonder why such a restriction might be deemed necessary.
>Was it Big Brother engineering?  -- Thou shalt not modify thy
>executable, for it is a Bad Thing. -- Or is there a valid technical
>reason behind it?

Most any system with page/segment descriptors allows execute only or read
only memory.

- Increased the address space for a PDP-11.

- Trashing data with a bad pointer is hard enough to track down; trashing
  code is even worse.

- If code cannot be modify, the system can safely and aggressively cache it.

The operating system should provide a way to move pages between data and
instruction space during execution.