Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: effect of free()
Message-ID: <1989Sep9.074311.1632@twwells.com>
Date: 9 Sep 89 07:43:11 GMT
References: <319@cubmol.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU> <3756@buengc.BU.EDU> <1989Aug17.005548.745@twwells.com> <16022@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> <248@seti.inria.fr> <10817@riks.csl.sony.co.jp>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 15

In article <10817@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> diamond@riks. (Norman Diamond) writes:
: Well, because a freed pointer is still valid in a call to realloc
: (as long as there are no intervening *alloc calls), and the data still
: have to be sitting in limbo, not really quite freed yet.  (Much to the
: chagrin of efficiency experts everywhere.)

In the latest versions of Unix, realloc is not guaranteed to work on a
freed pointer.

Moreover, my SysV has a version of malloc that *does* trash the
memory on free.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com