Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Run-time Checks for C Message-ID: <1988Nov19.214346.27450@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <10113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> Date: Sat, 19 Nov 88 21:43:46 GMT In article <10113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> raghavan@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Vijay Raghavan) writes: >the C language definition doesn't really preclude any implementation from >doing certain run-time checks (for array bounds, type checking, referring >contents of uninitialized pointer variables &c), it's just that most >(okay, all!) implementations don't do any such checking because of efficiency >reasons. Now I'm not sure that this statement is really true... It's true; there is at least one debugging-oriented implementation of C which does full pointer checking (which includes array-bounds checking), for example. The efficiency hit is high, unfortunately. -- Sendmail is a bug, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology not a feature. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu