gripes about error reporting

[John Buck]

> 
>     Is there anyone out there who is as frustrated as I am about the way
> that UN*X reports errors?  I'm getting pretty tired of trying to, say,
> .
> .
> .
> Stack overflow - obvious.
> Boundary condition ...
>
> Dave Cornutt
> Gould Computer Systems 

Seems to me that you are guilty of the same "crimes" you accuse the "pdp11"
folks of.  Several of your so-called "machine-independent" traps, like
Stack overflow, Boundary condition are slanted toward the (clumsy) Gould-like
architechure.  Many machines know how to handle stack violations correctly (by
growing the stack; in fact to not grow the stack automatically is probably a
flaw with the implementation or architecture.)
Imagine getting a stack overflow on a pdp11? what does that mean? (in a user
program that is)  Is it the same as a segmentation violation? (stack collides
with data?) or what?  Very unclear.

Boundary violations (doubleword, whatever) also fall into this category.
Some machines allow 'odd' addresses for words (Intel, for example), others
do not.  Hence, Boundary condition is not machine independent.

The bottom line is, it is very difficult to isolate the individual
flaws/features of every architecture and have accurate error reporting
under a single OS (that is portable).
It is not impossible, but difficult.  Software compatibility must be
maintained as well.  If the signal structure is changed for each machine,
this becomes difficult.

John Buck
Polytechnic Inst. of NY
Route 110
Farmingdale, NY 11735
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