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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because...
Date: 1996/06/23
Message-ID: <4qkio1$5pm@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1
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references: <4q8fbo$701@red.interact.net.au>
 <31CC75C1.5BF2AF6A@jinx.sckans.edu> <dewar.835489134@schonberg>
 <Pine.LNX.3.92.960623122941.795A-100000@switch.sp.org>
organization: George Washington University
newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-06-23T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <Pine.LNX.3.92.960623122941.795A-100000@switch.sp.org>,
The Deviant  <deviant@sp.org> wrote:
>
>But, the variable was initialized as
>
>char blah[5];
>
>which means it goes out of its bouts as soon as it tries to access
>blah[5], and thats when SIGSEGV, by definition, should occur.

Ah, but one of the beauties of C is that (in general) it doesn;t do
any range checking. Depending on how it really allocated your data,
your program may, or may not, have gone out of your memory area,
so no segmentation fault was raised.

It's adventures like this that are _so_ challenging to the macho
programmer types who just couldn't stand the compiler do wimpy stuff
like put range checking in their code.

Even nicer is an intermittent bug that _sometimes_  raises the seg
fault, depending on just how far you rolled beyond the bounds of your
array.

I'd much prefer to write that code as

   A: array (1..5) of character;

   . . .

   for i in A'range loop
     do_something_with_A;
   end loop;

Mike Feldman