Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site uwmacc.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!uwvax!uwmacc!curtis
From: curtis@uwmacc.UUCP (Alan Curtis)
Newsgroups: net.lang.pascal,net.micro.pc
Subject: Dangling pointers in Turbo
Message-ID: <1568@uwmacc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 16:10:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1568
Posted: Wed Oct 16 16:10:29 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 01:28:01 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: UWisconsin-Madison Academic Comp Center
Lines: 25
Xref: watmath net.lang.pascal:364 net.micro.pc:5632

*** PARITY ERROR ***
????

I've been using TURBO (V 3.0) on my PC to do some class work, and have
run into a problem whenever I accidentally leave pointers uninitialized
or use pointers that are set to nil.  The problem is that the illegal 
memory reference is never trapped by anything, subsequently the machine
bombs and the only way to restart it is with the big red switch.

A side effect of this is that if I haven't saved the current work file 
since the last change(s), it is lost (this has hurt a couple of times,
and therefore I am quite a bit more careful about saving before every
run).  Also, there is obviously no diagnostic about where the program
was when it went out into never-never land.

My question is: Is this just a result of using a cheap compiler, or
does MS-PASCAL and other "expensive" pascal compilers also suffer the
same problem?

Another question: If other compilers don't fix this problem, will a 
fancy OS (such as XENIX, PCIX, etc) trap these errors and prevent
the machine from going down?

_Alan Curtis
 {allegra, ihnp4, seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!curtis