Life after free?

[Karl Heuer]

In article <5620 at stpstn.UUCP> lerman at stpstn.UUCP (Ken Lerman) writes:
>In article <quan.654410256 at sol> quan at sol.surv.utas.oz (Stephen Quan) writes:
>->Any comments on free-ing tmp before it is return-ed?
>
>Not only is it sensible, the semantics of free require it.

No.  An early manual once made the mistake of describing the local
implementation instead of the interface%, but not all versions do it that
way.  Some modern systems still include such a guarantee, but only to provide
backward compatibility to the programs that were foolish enough to depend on
it.  The Standard doesn't even guarantee that you can *look* at the value
remaining in tmp, much less dereference it.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl at kelp.ima.isc.com or ima!kelp!karl), The Walking Lint
________
% Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit.  It was a poorly-designed interface, though.