Re: Uninitialized "out" parameters

[frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning)]

In article <4t7cnd$9t1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au
(Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

 <Pros/cons of suppressing range checks temporarily>

> 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.

OK -- sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for answering my question.

One nit -- I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say you're *guaranteed*
to get nonsense from the program. Suppose overwritten memory is
unused or non-critical? I can't help but wonder how much commercial
software is out there that would fail if range-checking was active.

(My Pascal is rusty -- I assume the manual's use of "range-checking"
refers to array indices going out of bounds?)

-- Frank Manning