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From: frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning)
Subject: Re: Uninitialized "out" parameters
Date: 1996/07/26
Message-ID: <4tblbf$g9i@news.ccit.arizona.edu>#1/1
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references: <31EEACDA.64880EEB@sage.inel.gov>
 <4t4r0s$8te@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <4t6f9d$12p0@news.ccit.arizona.edu>
 <4t7cnd$9t1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
organization: College of Engineering and Mines, University of Arizona
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-26T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


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