Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote in perl.perl6.language : > Basically, I'd like to be able to mark a variable as "sensitive" or > "secret". This implies that the language should overwrite the memory > it uses before deallocating it, and that if possible it should tell > the virtual memory system to avoid swapping it out. Moreover, it > should probably do so recursively, and to any value that has ever been > stored in the variable. (In essence, the *variable* marks all > *values* it ever contains as sensitive.) > > This feature could make Perl 6 a better language for security work > than any other I've seen. C and C++ could do this, but only with the > programmer's assistance (by calling a "wipe" function or making sure a > destructor is correctly called), and optimizers have been known to > "helpfully" remove such code.
Isn't the "volatile" modifier supposed to avoid this ? Oh, and remark that "volatile" is quite a high-level construct for a language like C. So, such a "sensitive" modifier could be added, but its precise meaning would be highly dependent on the underlying implementation. -- The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. -- Borges