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Original versions of Java used an ad-hoc check of ClassLoader
depth for making a number of security checks. Despite this being
an unpleasant feature for the Java virtual machine to support, the
notion has been generalized in the current Java runtimes from all the
major vendors (Netscape Communicator 4.0, Microsoft IE 4.0, and Sun
JDK 1.2). We are taking a closer look at the semantics of stack
inspection to gain a more formal understanding of its semantics. One
goal of this research is to provide guidance to a Java virtual machine
writer wishing to support high-performance stack inpsection. Another
goal is to understand how stack inspection may be useful to languages
besides Java, including those languages that do not maintain explicit
stacks (such as Standard ML of New Jersey).
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