Re: Attention Windows Users

Pete, thanks for the comments.

I do programming for personal use, self taught, but not a
novice. Started learning back in '83.

Most of my programming involves crunching databases of some
sort, mostly to do with my interest in seismology - reading
in data on 100's of thousands of quakes and then doing stuff
with that. I've always used some form of basic, currently
something called XBasic. http:\\www.xbasic.org

Anyway, in my programs, when I read in data, I couldn't see
how there could be a buffer overflow. So I asked the question
in the support group for XB.

In a nutshell it has to do with how the language allocates
memory. C allows one to write beyond the allocated block of
memory. A programmer would have to explicitly check that the
data they are writing to memory will not exceed the length
of the buffer.

XB on the other hand allocates memory dynamically so it's
not possible to overflow.

That's my limited understanding of it anyway. I may have
missed some details, but the point is, in a language like C
the programmer has to take specific measures to prevent the
overflow whereas in XB it's not possible to begin with, so
no worries. I mean, it is possible, but oyu'd have to do it
on purpose. Memory is not normally directly accessable in XB.

Brian
--
http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism
Seismic FAQ: http://www.skywise711.com/SeismicFAQ/SeismicFAQ.html
Quake "predictions": http://www.skywise711.com/quakes/EQDB/index.html
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
.

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