In my humble opinion, here we have two different vision of what
computer programming is, or should be. Your statement "maybe it's
better to assume that the programmer will not be aware of attacks" may
be true for the average Java programmer (please, no flame, no insult
intended to Java programmers reading this list!) but not for an OCaml
programmer. I want to be perfectly aware of attacks, and I want to be
in control of the data structure I use, and not "be unaware"...
In Python, the other language I use every day, dictionaries are
implemented as hash tables and not having reproducibility is a PITA.
--
Paolo
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:54, Romain Bardou <bar...@lsv.ens-cachan.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>> As you and Gerd said, the new Hashtbl implementation in the upcoming
>> major release has everything needed to randomize hash tables by
>> seeding. The question at this point is whether randomization should
>> be the default or not: some of our big users who don't do Web stuff
>> value reproducibility highly... We (OCaml core developers) will take
>> a decision soon.
>
>
> FWIW, as a developer I do not expect reproducibility from Hash tables (nor
> from the Random module actually) but I do expect some way to control
> reproducibility (i.e. read the current seed, give my own seed). Maybe it's
> better to assume that the programmer will not be aware of attacks, and
> provide him with a safer environment.
>
> On the other hand, when you find a bug and need reproducibility, it's too
> late if you have used a random seed without recording it. And could it break
> some existing applications?
>
> I guess you('re) already had(having) this discussion though.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Romain
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