Partial application in C

[Paul Gomme]

In article <619 at goofy.megatest.UUCP>, djones at megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) writes:
> 
> 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.
> 

> 
> 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.


	Unless my memory is failing me completely, I believe that OS/2 will
absolutely prohibit "executing data".  In fact, it does away with the
ubiquitous (MS-DOS) .COM file for the simple reason that they share code
and data segments.  My recollection is that this restriction is in place
in order to allow for "orderly" multitasking - i.e. if one process runs
amok, it shouldn't affect the other processes, which could occur if a program
can alter its code segment.
	Besides, I thought that self-modifying code was (a) extremely difficult
to write, and (b) considered poor programming practice.
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