Embedding Source Code in String Literals
Languages that lack flexibility in specifying string literals make it particularly cumbersome to write programming code that generates other programming code. This is particularly true when the generation language is the same or similar to the output language.
for example:
- writing code to produce quines
- generating an output language from within a web template;
- using XSLT to generate XSLT, or SQL to generate more SQL
- generating a PostScript representation of a document for printing purposes, from within a document-processing application written in C or some other language.
Nevertheless, some languages are particularly well-adapted to produce this sort of self-similar output, especially those that support multiple options for avoiding delimiter collision.
Using string literals as code that generates other code may have adverse security implications, especially if the output is based at least partially on untrusted user input. This is particularly acute in the case of Web-based applications, where malicious users can take advantage of such weaknesses to subvert the operation of the application, for example by mounting an SQL injection attack.
Read more about this topic: String Literal
Famous quotes containing the words source, code and/or string:
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it.... My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being.”
—Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
“Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)