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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,573be8c453ecbff4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: tmoran@bix.com Subject: Re: 'Read for pointers Date: 2000/07/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 651214626 References: X-Complaints-To: abuse@pacbell.net X-Trace: news.pacbell.net 964659677 207.214.211.104 (Wed, 26 Jul 2000 18:01:17 PDT) Organization: SBC Internet Services NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 18:01:17 PDT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-07-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: >I'm not sure I see your point, given the context. The "out" parameter is not set to null so if the procedure has a bug so that it isn't set, it will retain its previous value. Any uninitialized variable bug can be hard to find. But a pointer is especially hard, and in fact most pointers are automatically initialized to null, which helps a lot. Here the "out" parameter pointer in fact points to an internally correct data structure, just the wrong one, or one that might have been deallocated. I think such a bug might take a while to track down.