Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!noao!mcdsun!mcdchg!clyde!skep2!wcs
From: wcs@skep2.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Referencing through a null pointer
Message-ID: <87@skep2.ATT.COM>
Date: 29 Apr 88 03:20:23 GMT
References: <4729@cup.portal.com> <1988Apr24.092740.8673@utzoo.uucp> <50676@sun.uucp> <2730@bsu-cs.UUCP> <Apr.25.20.40.05.1988.10155@topaz.rutgers.edu> <9946@tekecs.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: wcs@skep2.UUCP (46323-Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>,2G218,x0705,)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs Center 4632, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 21

In article <9946@tekecs.TEK.COM> andrew@frip.gwd.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) writes:
> If I'm a computer center manager searching for a replacement
> for my aging 11/780's, and my several-megabyte Bread-and-Butter
> Application works on system X but not on system Y, how much
> credence do you think the Y salesperson will get from me when she
> explains that my program has no business dereferencing 0?

	Sigh.  It's evil, and managers just don't *understand* :-).
We have a manager here who still doesn't trust HPs becuase the
floating point formats are different, and doesn't trust 3Bs because
they're big-endian.

You can't just fix it by putting a zero into location zero, either,
since people can dereference structure pointers without setting
them first.  (i.e. struct foo { int a,b,c; } foo; x=foo->c; )
You might tell them that VAX programs that suffer from this problem
will sometimes produce WRONG OUTPUT SILENTLY on VAXen.
-- 
#				Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
# skep2 is a local machine I'm trying to turn into a server.  Please send
# mail to ho95c or ho95e instead.  Thanks.