Path: news.mathworks.com!not-for-mail
From: "James Tursa" <aclassyguywithaknotac@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: Submission of p-code
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:59:09 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Boeing
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"Paul Mennen" <nospam@mennen.org> wrote in message
<fotc00$arf$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> 
> Sometimes there can be value in sharing p-code. ...
> 
> ~Paul
> 

Yes, that is certainly true and I agree with all of your
points. But frankly I am a little surprised that the
Mathworks allows p-code submissions since it would seem to
allow a program (either intentionally from an
ill-intentioned programmer or unintentionally from a bad
programmer) to do nasty things without the downloader being
allowed to look at the source code and look for potential
problems first. Like "what is that system call really doing
to my disk drive? Why is this program trying to read some
files and then send e-mail? I thought this was just a
plotting program." etc. etc. What guarantee is there that
the associated m-file in the post was actually the one used
to generate the p-code? Does the Mathworks actually check
this and provide some protection here? I don't know.

James Tursa