effect of free()

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1693 at levels.sait.edu.au> CCDN at levels.sait.edu.au (DAVID NEWALL) writes:
-In article <11070 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
-> In particular, there is a school of thought that says machine architecture
-> should be designed to assist in program reliability.  That school
-> occasionally influences computer architectures such that actions like
-> merely continuing to shuffle around invalid pointers cause an error trap
-> to be taken.
-That is supposed to make programs reliable?

Not in itself; it's a side effect of the architecture design.

-Testing parameters for "correctness", rather than blindly hoping that they
-are "correct", is one way to make programs more reliable.  Does that school
-of yours suggest that it's OK to believe all (non-null) pointers?

It's not "my school"; I'm just telling you about it.  There is far more
to this than error traps on invalid pointer reference.  If you have a
reasonable textbook on computer architectures, try looking there.
Otherwise Glen Myer's "Advances in Computer Architecture" would be a
good starting point for enlightenment.