Re: pointer questions

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam@spam.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote:

> That's hard to believe.  Dr. Wrigley said the hardware failures turned
> from "insideous" to "catastophic" when he changed some sort of Things to
> pointers-to-Things.  I take that to mean, he got wrong answers before,
> and crashes after.  Is that right, Dr. Wrigley?

Thinking about it a little more, I get the idea that before he had 1 pointer to 
a 1 GB data structure on the heap. Then he changed to a large number of pointers 
to smaller data structures on the heap, equivalent to the previous 1 GB structure.

With more pointers, there's a greater chance that one of the pointers might have 
a bit flip, resulting in the occasional crash (1 crash every few months, IIRC).

Of course, this is sheer speculation.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"There's no messiah here. There's a mess all right, but no messiah."
Monty Python's Life of Brian
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