Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ico!ism780c!news
From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: effect of free()
Message-ID: <33383@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 15 Sep 89 21:24:32 GMT
References: <319@cubmol.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU> <3756@buengc.BU.EDU> <10988@smoke.BRL.MIL> <9339@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> <1641@levels.sait.edu.au> <11070@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 13

In article <1641@levels.sait.edu.au> CCDN@levels.sait.edu.au (DAVID NEWALL) writes:
>I have a philosophy which I am going to share with you:  Avoid unnecessary
>restrictions.  Is it truly necessary that one not be able to *look* at a
>pointer without first knowing that it is valid?  I claim that it is not.

I don't understand this discussion.  Inspecting a pointer variable that is
not initialzed is no different from inspecting ANY uninitialized variable.  A
pointer that has free applied to it is unitialized.  How in the world could
any programming language be defined to assign a useful meaning to the
inspection uninitialized data?  Hint: defining the state of local data at
procedure entry can be very expensive.

    Marv Rubinstein