Re: pointer questions

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

"Dr. Adrian Wrigley" <amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk.uk.uk> writes:

> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:21:37 +0000, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> I Thinks so, but the error rate was very low, so it is hard to tell.

Interesting.

Some years ago I used a computer that developed a hardware problem.
It would randomly flip the fifth bit of some bytes, once in a while.
It took a long time to even notice the problem, because that changes
letters to/from upper/lower case, in ASCII.  So we would look at
a text file, and fix some "typos" -- change "hEllo" to "hello".
Until it started happening more and more.

- Bob