catering to bad code

Henry Spencer henry at utzoo.UUCP
Tue Mar 3 06:40:05 AEST 1987


> >> At any rate it has been my experience that something like 70 - 80 %
> >> of the C programs I have ported have had pointer problems.
> >
> >Grepping through the Gould UTX 2.0 sources, I found 19 standard 4.3BSD
> >progams (out of about 420) had been altered...
> 
> ... the code that I was talking about when I said 70 - 80 % had 
> pointer problems was not the code from 4.3BSD. ...

It is worth pointing out that Berklix (x.yBSD) is not a fair test case
for NULL-pointer problems, because the interaction between Berkeley and
Sun shook most of the NULL-pointer bugs out of Berklix.  Sun did it because
the hardware of the early Suns pretty much demanded an inaccessible page
at location zero.
-- 
"We must choose: the stars or	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
the dust.  Which shall it be?"	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry



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