Run-time Checks for C

T. William Wells bill at twwells.uucp
Sun Nov 20 02:18:53 AEST 1988


In article <10113 at umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> raghavan at umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Vijay Raghavan) writes:
:
:    I made a casual statement in a local bulletin board to the effect that
: the C language definition doesn't really preclude any implementation from
: doing certain run-time checks (for array bounds, type checking, referring
: contents of uninitialized pointer variables &c), it's just that most
: (okay, all!) implementations don't do any such checking because of efficiency
: reasons. Now I'm not sure that this statement is really true (I mean I'm not
: sure that sufficient information can always be passed to the compiler for it
: to generate code for meaningful run-time checks.)
:
:    Comments?

It is entirely possible to do complete run-time checking; I understand
that there are some C interpreters that do this. It is not cheap,
however.

---
Bill
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