3 ms·

"Immune to viruses in spreadsheet files." I find this claim dubious.

• wglb 11y ago
  Because?
  • technomancy 11y ago
    Elsewhere in the manual it seems to imply that formulas can include arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions, which would make it quite easy to implement a virus as there appears to be no sandboxing. What it probably means is that viruses written for other spreadsheet implementations won't work on it. Edit: never mind; I read further and it does do some sandboxing based on the same whitelisting principles as directory-local variable settings. Very clever.
    • bastawhiz 11y ago
      Even still, pure interpreters are not immune to vulnerabilities. One buffer overflow or bad array lookup and you're hosed.
      • wglb 11y ago
        I must admit that I haven't heard of buffer overflows in emacs lisp.
        • hollerith 11y ago
          Right. When all of the language's data structures are garbage collected and the language has no pointer types, buffer overflows become much rarer. There are a few array-lookup operations like AREF, but they do bounds checking (at run time, when the check is easier to get right).