In thinking about the whole subject of how languages deal with types recently , it struck me that calling something anuntyped language is usually somewhat of a misnomer.

Most things that get called untyped languages, such as assembly code,actually have types; it's just that they are attached to operationsinstead of to values (and variables, and storage locations). Arguablyassembly language has stronger typing for arithmetic operations thanmost high level languages, since there isn't any silent conversionbetween different types of numbers.

Thinking

Due to recent events I have become interested inthis issue, so I have been poking around and doing some experiments.Unfortunately, while Linux has a bewildering variety of memory relatedper-process resource limits that you can set, most of them don't work ordon't do you any good.

What you have, in theory and practice:

• ulimit -m , the maximum RSS, doesn't do anything; the kernelmaintains the number but never seems to use it for anything.

• ulimit -d

For our backwards compatibility sins, we have plain POP3 exposed tothe general Internet. This morning, we discovered that our POP3 serverhad more or less locked up around 6:30 am, apparently because someonedecided to open up hundreds of connections to it and perform a bruteforce mass account/password attempt.

(In fact it took down our IMAP server too, because we're runningDovecot. This is one of the annoying limitations of Dovecot; there is acentral server process that has a