Esthetics (or worse?) of Secure Pointers

[Joern Rennecke]

> 
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 10:45:44PM -0400, David Edelsohn wrote:
> > 	The ELF architecture field in the header is assigned, not
> > something that one can "pick a new specifier" without causing conflicts. 
> 
> But since the ABI is effectively different anyways, one could argue it is a
> different machine (John's proposal) and/or uses a data encoding (my proposal)
> or even using some other field.

John's proposal is not practical, since it means that you have to allocate
a new machine identifier for every machine identifier in existance where
you would contemplate using the BP checking compiler.  And also for all
future non-BP machine identifiers.  And you have to make sure you don't
step on someone's elses toes while doing these allocations.

The data encoding proposal seems much more practical to me.  You just have
to add two more types, and cover all architectures.