Laurence Gonsalves

This reminds me why I canceled my Scientific American subscription years ago… - Amit Patel

Heh. I certainly don't enjoy it as much as when they had Computer/Mathematical Recreations and Amateur Scientist... - Laurence Gonsalves

Argh! Has nobody but you figured this stuff out? I did see a clever technique from Kamkinsky (http://intoverflow.wordpress.com/2010...) where he tries to maximize the difference between the string and escaped string so that any lapses in escaping become immediately obvious, but that's only useful for database escaping, I think. - Amit Patel

That intoverflow post is interesting. The bit where he says "we still need to address the fact that we’re abusing the String type" is exactly what I've been thinking for years. Though he goes on to say that "User-input should be its own distinct type". While I think that's potentially useful, I think that kind of solves the 10% problem rather than the 90% problem. The more fundamental problem is that HTML and CSS and JavaScript and SQL and plaintext are not all the same type of thing even though we use a single type to represent all of them: string. - Laurence Gonsalves

We put lots of differently-typed stuff into string, just as we put kilometers and hours into float. :-( - Amit Patel

That hardly ever causes problems, though... http://goo.gl/5Y1o ;-) - Laurence Gonsalves

Impressive. Even incognito mode isn't quite watertight on my Mac. - Private Sanjeev

Interesting. I wonder which of the storage mechanisms foil incognito mode. - Laurence Gonsalves