One context where they are useful: When students in my course submit their programs, I would like to use a program of my own to automatically load, run, and test their programs. So I need to be able to dynamically load their program files from my running program, and then I want to execute and interact with their programs (by calling functions for example, and examining the returned result to make sure it is what it should be) - but without bad behavior in their programs (such as a runtime error, infinite loop, etc.) affecting the ability of my program to operate. So, what I do is set up a "sandbox" - an isolated interpreter basically - into which their program file can be loaded and then I can kind of poke at their programs and examine them in a safe manner.
In general, any scenario where you need to dynamically load *untrusted* code might be a situation where you would want to use a sandbox to isolate that code from your program and yet still be able to interact with it to some degree. If all you wanted to do was dynamically load code that you trust (i.e. you wrote yourself, or trust the source), then instead of a sandbox there are other mechanisms to do that more directly (things like 'eval', 'dynamic-require', 'load', etc.) I hope that helps some... --- nadeem On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:46 PM, Harry Spier <vasishtha.sp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Would it be possible for someone to briefly explain what sandboxes are > used for. The documentation Racket Reference 13.11 explains what they > do, but could someone explain where you would use them. > > Thanks, > Harry Spier ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
