Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!warwick!nott-cs!piaggio!anw
From: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission
Message-ID: <1990Oct11.100302.19258@maths.nott.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Oct 90 10:03:02 GMT
References: <64618@lanl.gov) <2883@igloo.scum.com) <2171@enea.se> <1990Oct8.135551.21639@arnor.uucp> <14972@cbmvax.commodore.com> <1224@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Organization: Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
Lines: 16

In article <1224@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> chased@rbbb.Eng.Sun.COM
(David Chase) writes:
> [...]								In C,
>C++, Pascal, Modula-2, BCPL, and PL/1, the programmer is responsible
>for ensuring that whatever the pointer points to is not reused while
>the pointer is in use.  Getting this wrong leads to messy bugs [...]

	In sensible languages (like Algol), storage allocation and,
more importantly, deallocation is monitored by the compiler and the
run-time support.  So this bug is detected mostly as a compilation
error, occasionally as a run-time fault, but in any case *when it
happens*, not when the program inexplicably fails some time later.

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk