Re: Education and security -- another perspective (was "ACM Queue - Content")

[ljknews <ljknews () mac com>]

At 9:40 AM -0400 7/7/04, James Walden wrote:
> Dana Epp wrote:

> > Of course, I also think students should have to take at least one course in ASM to really understand how computer 
> > instructions work, so they can gain a foundation of learning for the heart of computer processing. And
> > I think they should be taught the powers and failures of C. Since I know many of you think I'm nuts for that, you 
> > might want to look at this outline with the same amount of consideration.
>
> I agree with you on both of those requirements.  You need to have a basic understanding of assembly and how C is 
> translated into assembly to understand the most common types of buffer overflow attacks.  There are better languages 
> for secure programming than C, but students are almost certainly going to have to read or write C at some point in 
> their careers, so they need to understand it.

What is wrong with this picture ?

I see both of you willing to mandate the teaching of C and yet not
mandate the teaching of any of Ada, Pascal, PL/I etc.

This seems like the teaching of "making do".
-- 
Larry Kilgallen