Re: [Boston.pm] Historical question: origin of the idea of tainting

David Cantrell <[email protected]> Wed, 17 Apr 2019 16:58:48 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.perl.perl-mongers.boston
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 09:55:30AM -0400, Andy Oram wrote:

> Thanks, Uri. I don't want to bother Larry over this tiny historical detail.
> Now that you tell me that tainting was in Perl 4, that pushes the origin to
> the early 1990s or before. That's one detail I can use.

A bit of git archaeology shows that it appears to have been introduced
to perl in what is now git tag perl-3.000.

If you check out that tag you'll find plenty of mentions of it, go back
one commit and there's nothing. That's not completely definitive, as
the early commits in the repo appear to have just been someone checking
in the contents of a tar ball, and there are obvious gaps in the record,
but it's plausible that a major feature like that would be in a X.0
release.

-- 
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice

One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't
    -- Marge Simpson