Hacker News Reader

Me too! I wonder why that is?

I suspect that they wanted to use conditional expressions or something without having to use a "real" programming language with loops or I/O, which risks freezing the interpreter and leaking data.

It's actually a DSL written in scheme that is then used to generate the sandboxing rules, so loops aren't possible. I had the chance to speak with the guys working on it about a year ago. macOS security is pretty neat stuff.

Interesting! Is it actually a dialect of Scheme or just a LISP syntax custom language? s-expressions are a fairly nice way to create small custom rules languages or configuration languages as they are very easy to parse.

It's TinyScheme, apparently.

Thanks!

I vaguely remember that some settings / control-panel-thingy was written in Scheme on Windows. That was at least 20 years ago, though, so it’s probably gone by now.

There are components in Windows that still exist from the NT days, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of these were still there.