Sanitizing first class values

[George Georgalis <george@...>]

Hi - I'm taking my first serious look at Lua after hearing it will
be available as a scripting language in NetBSD kernel space. I'm
impressed so far, and sure I will continue to like it :)

Just finished looking over the new list and found the JSON
and inheritance threads interesting. Also, the "Protocol
Specification in Lua" discussion. Any solution for that? In the
past I have embedded latex in code comments which I was able to
grep/regex out for documentation revisions. I'm inclined to think
documentation/specification data in tables accessed through a
special invocation would be the best practical solution. But if
the interpreter could output data types and structs in use, that
would certainly be interesting.

I have a more specific question for the list. I'm learning about
first class values and think it's a neat concept, but I don't
understand how it can be used while sanitizing user input data at
the same time? For example, never a good idea to shell-expand or
interpret user input.  How are first class values any different
than this practice?

-George