New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One

An anonymous reader writes "What's your favorite programming language? Is it CSS? Is it JavaScript? Is it PHP, HTML5, or something else? Why choose? A new programming language developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is all of those and more — one of the world's first "polyglot" programming languages. Sound cool? It is, except its development is partially funded by the National Security Agency, so let's look at it with a skeptical eye. It's called Wyvern — named after a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four — and it's supposed to help programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.

Comments

Compiler virus

[penguinoid]

Wasn't there some discussion on how effective a special, compiler-embedded virus would be? This seems like a good candidate for that.

Which behaviour?

[NotInHere]

This program is valid C and, when saved as "test2.java", valid java code. Compilation with the C compiler results in a program that doesn't behave the same way if it were compiled with java:

//\
/*
#include "stdio.h"
/**///\
public class test2 {

//\
public static
void main //\
(String[]a)//\
/*
(int argc, char *argv[])//*/
{
  //\
  System.out.printf("hi, I'm java\n");/*
  printf("hi, I'm C\n");//*/
}

//\
}

Re:Wyvern = Wyrm

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The standard NSA tatctic for introducing security holes into a system is to obfuscate things so that holes are hard to spot and find. SELinux is probably such a system, and this polglot language -- which effectviely makes debugging impossible -- is likely another.