Re: [MacPerl] Internal Conversions

[Brian McNett <brianmc@telebyte.net>]

In Message <35E1E70F.15FB@flash.net>, Mark Manning/Muniz Eng. 
<markem@flash.net>, said:

> Anyway, has anyone ever tried making MacPerl modify a program on-the-fly
> as the program was executing?

This is DEFINITELY NOT a good idea regardless of what language you do it 
in.

I suspect that on any other OS, protected memory would prevent a program 
from doing this sort of thing (which is a good thing about protected 
memory).  On the Mac this could potentially be done.  Technically there's 
nothing to prevent it.  However...   This is very, very, very, bad 
technique.

Generally speaking a program should not ever modify another program which 
is executing concurrently, nor should a program modify itself.  Use 
another non-executing program as data, or even make a copy of itself and 
modify that, yes.  Done all the time.  But the other thing?  You're just 
setting yourself up for a world of hurt.



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