effect of free()

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2054 at munnari.oz.au> ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>So what's so special about other (pointer values that may not be
>dereferenced)?

You'll never grasp what we're trying to say so long as you try to interpret
it in terms of conventional architectures, because we're talking about a
hardware trap that occurs NOT when an invalid pointer is used to REFERENCE
an object, by when the invalid pointer itself is merely INSPECTED.  This
occurs only for certain special architectures, such as "tagged" ones.  It
can be a useful software reliability feature when properly exploited, which
is why SWARD-like designs may well implement it.

You won't have the problem we're talking about on your VAX or Macintosh.