Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!csun!Twg-S5!abcscnuk
From: abcscnuk@Twg-S5.uucp (Naoto Kimura (ACM))
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: SEEKING PROBLEMS ABOUT TURBO PASCAL
Message-ID: <1990Dec21.045802.16278@csun.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 90 04:58:02 GMT
References: <25323@adm.brl.mil>
Sender: news@csun.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: csun
Lines: 25

One BIG problem for most beginners is that Turbo Pascal has
range-checking turned off by default.  In installing Turbo Pascal here
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
at CSUN, I made sure that it got installed with the range-checking
turned on.

The thing that I find too bad about this is that the very people who
need to have range-checking turned on are those who are first-timers
and didn't know what this does, nor would know that they had to turn it
on.  One person I knew spent two weeks tracking down an array index out
of range error.  After informing him about the array bounds checking,
the problem became immediately apparent.

Another person I knew got screwed over by his partners when they
***EXPLICITY TURNED IT OFF***.  After getting rid of the compiler
directive, the problem showed up in part of the initialization code
that his partners wrote.  It was full of unititialized variables and
unreasonable assumptions -- which were "fixed" by turning off the
range-checking.

                //-n-\\			 Naoto Kimura
        _____---=======---_____		 (abcscnuk@csuna.csun.edu)
    ====____\   /.. ..\   /____====
  //         ---\__O__/---         \\	Enterprise... Surrender or we'll
  \_\                             /_/	send back your *&^$% tribbles !!