I actually tried something a little like this a while ago. I wanted to allow users to be able to run arbitrary code, somewhat similar to a MOO (Object-Orientated MUD (Multi-User Dungeon)). But I was using tied hashes to databases and it turned out to be completely impractical to allow them to do anything vaguely complicated (and therefore useful).

From my brief experiments it seemed that if you want to allow them to program anything more than a pocket calculator, you'd be better off writing your own scripting language and interpreter. Alas I have found no trace of such a project in perl.

If you need to allow a large number of vaguely-trusted users to run arbitrary scripts, I would recommend buying them a box, and giving them all limited shell acounts (or CGI execute permsisions) and keeping the data they access on another machine, say a PostGreSQL server.

SAFE seems to be a really excellent module, but you would have to be very skilled with the internal workings of perl to set it up right, and you would still be limited because you wouldn't be able to allow your users to call modules (which would almost certainly use banned codes), which is a very desirable thing. Apologies if I have overlooked some feature of SAFE which allows you to do the above, but I couldn't find it.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

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