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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,7272aa7508a3d83f X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net.POSTED!a6202946!not-for-mail From: "Jeffrey R. Carter" Organization: jrcarter at acm dot org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: pointer questions References: <19cfb$4361207d$4995001$19541@ALLTEL.NET> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:21:37 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.3.218.73 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net 1130739697 67.3.218.73 (Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:21:37 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:21:37 PST Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6066 Date: 2005-10-31T06:21:37+00:00 List-Id: 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 84