Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Life after free? Keywords: free malloc Message-ID: <3905@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Date: 4 Oct 90 08:24:37 GMT References: <5620@stpstn.UUCP> <26770@mimsy.umd.edu> <2539@cirrusl.UUCP> Distribution: comp Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 15 In article <2539@cirrusl.UUCP>, dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes: > In <26770@mimsy.umd.edu> chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes: > The compiler is free to, as Ron Natalie once put it, stuff arguments > into an envelope and mail them off to the function being called... > This idea has always seemed so quaint, but I wonder if it really works > for pointers? It works just fine. What you overlooked is that when you want to dereference a pointer, you have to mail it _back_ to me! (As it happens, there are multiprocessor implementations of certain programming languages where this very thing happens, interpreting "put in an envelope and mail" as "put in a packet and squirt down a wire".) -- Fixed in the next release.