Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Run-time Checks for C Message-ID: <187@twwells.uucp> Date: 19 Nov 88 16:18:53 GMT References: <10113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale Lines: 20 In article <10113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> raghavan@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Vijay Raghavan) writes: : : I made a casual statement in a local bulletin board to the effect that : 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 (I mean I'm not : sure that sufficient information can always be passed to the compiler for it : to generate code for meaningful run-time checks.) : : Comments? It is entirely possible to do complete run-time checking; I understand that there are some C interpreters that do this. It is not cheap, however. --- Bill {uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill