PUA Stack-heap collisions (was Re: Moving goalposts,...)

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Jun 21 2002 - 19:05:22 EDT


Eric Muller asked:

> >By the way, that is in a discussion of the Corporate Use subarea and
> >was aimed at the kind of users which you are not.
> >
> I always wondered if the UTC and the Unicode community still believed in
> this corporate vs. end-user distinction.

IMO, not really. Part of the clarification of the text for this section
is aimed at placing further warnings about this, including the
recognition that many platform vendors must treat the entire PUA as
end-user defined, precisely because no PUA code point can truly be
reserved for a safe internal use.

> In most of the things I do, I
> use systems that are provided by more than one vendor. Just for this
> email, I am using a combination of Windows 2000, Netscape and some input
> method, so we are four players here. That makes the two players model
> pretty useless: no matter how you split four in two, there is a boat
> with at least two guys and they can step on each other's toes.

In effect, the PUA is a freefire zone, and no matter where you stand,
you could take a stray bullet. To be safe, platform level software
should usually try to stay away from it. ;-)

> Some good news: I recently had more encounters with the PUA, and I am
> now totally cured. I pretty much decided that it was way too much
> trouble to use the PUA, and that I would refuse to use a PUA character
> in any of my documents. Life is too short.

And likely to get shorter with the Heapsters discharging their
firearms randomly into the sky unconcerned that they might land
in your nice neat corporate Stack.

--Ken

>
> Eric.



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