Talk:Macro and security

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This article mixes two different topics[edit]

Macros, as explained at the beginning of this article, can be: keyboard/mouse macros, which automate things on the desktop of a user or in an application, and substitutions which occur on a program's source code, as specified by the developer.

These two uses of the term, although related in a very loose way, cover vastly different usages, and are completely unrelated from a security point of view.

For example, keyboard/mouse macros can be present in a document without the user's knowledge, and they may cause security problems because they exploit security breaches in the software used to display the document (e.g. a word processor).
On the other hand, C or LISP macros are present in the source code of a program because the developer willingly wrote them (or the developer of some separate library did so), and their use may make it more likely for some classes of bugs to occur. However, this is the case for any language (mis-)feature, for example the availability of pointers in a language introduces another class of bugs which become more likely to occur. This is not a security issue per se, and other (mis-)features of programming languages and their corresponding classes of bugs are not covered in this article.

I feel that this article should become a disambiguation page, pointing to two articles:

One article describing the security issues related to keyboard/mouse, VBA etc. macros.
One article describing the pitfalls of macros in programming languages (C-like macros, but also more evolved macro systems like those of LISP or the variants of Scheme).

Do others agree/disagree that this change would be beneficial?

Furthermore, the tone of this article feels more like a blog article, rather than a Wikipedia article.

Jahvascriptmaniac (talk) 13:41, 24 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Junk[edit]

This article is, like, weird man. The entire "Compiler error" section appears to be nonsense, for example William M. Connolley (talk) 21:39, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm kinda doubtful this article should even exist. But I'll make some efforts to fix it, mostly by chopping stuff out (the compiler error section for example) William M. Connolley (talk) 19:24, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]