From bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com Mon Aug 10 19:51:02 1992 Received: from travis.csd.harris.com by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA24358; Mon, 10 Aug 92 19:51:02 +0200 Received: from amber.ssd.csd.harris.com by travis.csd.harris.com (5.61/harris-5.1) id AA08682; Mon, 10 Aug 92 13:50:55 -0400 Received: by amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (5.61/CX/UX-5.0) id AA23113; Mon, 10 Aug 92 13:50:51 -0400 Date: Mon, 10 Aug 92 13:50:51 -0400 From: bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) Message-Id: <9208101750.AA23113@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com> To: JLS@liverpool.ac.uk Cc: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk In-Reply-To: Lawrie Schonfelder's message of Wed, 05 Aug 92 11:54:21 BST <9208051106.AA12382@dkuug.dk> Subject: (SC22WG5.156) Defect Report X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 > Date: Wed, 05 Aug 92 11:54:21 BST > From: Lawrie Schonfelder > X-Sequence: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk 156 > X-Charset: ASCII > X-Char-Esc: 29 > 1 A number of members of WG5 consider that the current standard is > defective due to its specification of the initial status of pointers as > undefined. We believe that this defect was introduced deliberately but > inadvertently in the sence that a significant proportion of both X3J3 > and WG5 at the time were not fully aware of the consequeces of this > decision. Subsequent analysis and example use of the language > demonstrate that this will result in seriously inefficient programs or > seriously unsafe programs. For this reason we believe that this defect > should be corrected as soon as possible by the appropriate technical > corrigendum. > 2 The suggested correction to this defect is that pointers should be > initially disassociated rather than undefined. In this case a pointer only > ever becomes undefined as the result of a program fault and the > programmer can rely on pointers in any standard conforming program > having a defined status. The edits proposed below are suggested as > those necessary to make this correction. I think this is a terrible idea. In most uses of pointers, the first thing one does with the pointer is point it at something, or explicitly initialize it to NULL. If the compiler also generates code to initialize the pointer, then the operation is done twice. This could be extremely crippling in an application that allocates an array of 10,000 pointers! If you want the pointer initialized, then do it yourself. Everyone shouldn't have to pay a performance penalty because other programmers can't be bothered to write correct programs. Bill Leonard Harris Computer Systems Division 2101 W. Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309 bill@ssd.csd.harris.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How many lawyer jokes are there? A: Only three. The rest are true stories. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------