From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,803df5f3f60558d5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Uninitialized "out" parameters Date: 1996/07/25 Message-ID: <4t7cnd$9t1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 170114083 references: <31EEACDA.64880EEB@sage.inel.gov> <4t1s3n$chv@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <4t4r0s$8te@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <4t6f9d$12p0@news.ccit.arizona.edu> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia nntp-posting-user: ok newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning) writes: :In article <4t4r0s$8te@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au :(Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: :> Roughly the third most frightening thing I have seen in a computer :> manual is the advice :> "If your program is halting with range-checking errors, :> and you don't want to address those problems immediately, :> you can always omit the {$R+} compiler directive :> [thus suppressing the range checks] for the time being." :> to be found in the Turbo Pascal 5.0 User Guide on p207. :Not to be argumentative, but I'm curious as to why you think this is so :bad? Because once such a check would have failed, the program is operating in never-never land, and any *other* problems you may chose to address first may, in fact, be artefacts of the nonsense you are guaranteed to be getting. If your program is halting with range-checking errors, the only kind of problem that it is useful to diagnose is a problem that occurs *before* that halt. Which means that you want to switch additional checks on so the program halts *earlier*, if anything. This is especially true in a programming language running on old DOS, where a range check failure that is not caught may mean that your program has just scribbled all over the operating system or the debugger... -- Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ??? Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.