Re: lisp security

[Deutsch at PARC-MAXC]

Amen.  We considered the Lisp security question at some length here at PARC
(in trying to do an airtight "virtual machine" implementation) and concluded
that yes, it was technically feasible to make a Lisp system as secure as the
operating system it was embedded in, and no, it wasn't worth doing, because the
cost in inconvenience in an environment where the whole point was
experimentation far outweighed the degree to which we wanted to protect a
hacker from bringing his personal machine down in flames.

If we are talking about a world in which the operating system itself is
distributed among the various individual computers, the considerations become
quite different.  But we aren't.