Re: More On Impenetrable Images

[straz (Steve Strassmann)]

 > His curiosity aroused, he, along with a staff of well-seasoned and
 >terrifyingly critical technical people, start asking questions like:  Can you
 >deliver stable, secure, and serious application-grade software in Lisp?  Will
 >our proprietary aircraft performance data, or student pilot progress data be
 >at risk?  

I think these questions are equally valid of any programming language, 
not just lisp. It sounds like you need to look into cryptographic
solutions to your security issues, which are beyond the scope of what
we're able to provide, as a compiler vendor. 

The binhex example is a simple straightforward example of removing
the listener from casual users. This is enough of a barrier for all
but a few extremely determined crackers. But watch out: there's never 
any guarantee that someone with Macsbug couldn't get at data in a 
program, no matter what language it's written in. Just think of all 
the people who have reverse-engineered "cheat modes" for popular game 
software. It's safe to say that even hiding the listener will not 
guarantee protection from determined crackers.

As for stability and seriousness, I feel pretty comfortable saying that
MCL is no more likely to cause problems in your final product than
any other commercial compiler for Macintosh. We think MCL generates
high-quality code, and although no complex product is ever bug-free, we 
think MCL is pretty darn close for most of our users. I personally feel 
there are additional product-quality advantages to using lisp versus C++,
but we don't need to rehash the language wars here.