On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 01:01:39PM -0800, Jeff Newmiller wrote: > > > > > > And I submit that without the core dump, the bug of having forgotten > > > to set *person's fields just got much, much harder to track down. > > > > > > > Core dumps are useful for tracking down bugs. > > While I am not very comfortable with bunches of NULL pointers in records, > I am not sure that depending on the garbage in a malloc'd memory block to > be non-NULL is a good idea either.
No, it's not. But it is at least a good deal more likely to be non-NULL. But you're right: a more reliable way to ensure core dumps when you make an error of this sort is to *specifically* initialize all values to something you *know* will dump core. I've heard from people that do this. Of course, this really doesn't get you anywhere, since you could forget to initialize your pointers to garbage just as easily as you can forget to initialize them to something more meaningful. And linking with electric fence will get you about the same level of reliability, with much less work. Turning on -W -Wall -O2 and not ignoring the resulting warnings can be very helpful for detecting initialization problems, too. But I still prefer the direct, blunt forcefulness that a core dump presents... :-) -Micah _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech