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From: Sam Kendall <kendall>
Subject: Re: allocator and GC locality (was Re: cost of malloc)
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kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de (James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763) wrote:

>Accessing contents with an index > 0 is undefined behavior;
>with any implementation of reasonable quality, it will cause a bounds
>check error.  (Of course, I've never seen an implementation of C with
>reasonable quality, so you may be safe.  Although I seem to have heard
>somewhere that there is one, Centerline, maybe?)

That's right; CenterLine has a C/C++ interpreter that checks all sorts of
things, including array and pointer bounds.  There are other products,
notably Purify and similar things, that catch some but not all bounds
violations in these awful, unsafe languages.

My fantasy: what if 10% of the effort spent in developing these C/C++
error-checking tools (I've written major chunks of several of them) were spent
switching programmers over to a good, safe language like Modula-3 or Dylan?
Ah, but on these newsgroups I'm mostly preaching to the converted.

--Sam Kendall

