RE: question (preference?) about xmalloc

[Cameron, Steve]

        [smc]  David Thornley wrote: [...]
> If xmalloc is to initialize memory, I'd prefer it to be initialized
> to something obviously bad.  Jonathan Gilligan had some very good
> suggestions.  Now, "obviously bad" is system-specific, but it's better
> than initializing to a value selected to be innocuous.  (Steve Maguire,
> in "Writing Solid Code", p. 49, gives some good pointers on selecting
> a bad value.)
        [smc]  IBM (and some others) like to use the value 0xDEADBEEF 
        for this purpose.  (and you probably thought IBM had no sense of
humor.)
        I suppose on a machine with 4Gb of virtual (or real) memory, this
won't 
        always work.  (and then there's the 64 bit machines) So I'm not
        suggesting CVS should use DEADBEEF..