Partial application in C

Dave Jones djones at megatest.UUCP
Sat Jun 25 05:32:22 AEST 1988


>From article <3353 at cognos.UUCP>, by jimp at cognos.uucp (Jim Patterson):
> there are machines that don't allow you to execute data as
> code.

So this guy goes to the doctor, see, and he wiggles his arm and
says, "	Doc, my arm hurts when I do this."  So the doctor says,
"Then don't *DO* that!"

When I published a runtime linking loader a while back, there were
some who mentioned that on some machines you could not "execute data."
My immediate reaction was to say, "Then don't *USE* those kinds of machines!"

But of course, you may have to.  It's good to know that the restriction
exits, although I will continue to use dynamic loading, because I
have applications that absolutely scream for it.

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?  I can see one possible rationale: You can have 128KB of 
memory in a sixteen bit machine, divided evenly between data and code,
if you use all the addresses for both kinds of memory.



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