The answer to this may be: it depends.

In a batch program it is probably best to abort the program.  In a windowing 
environment it might be best to ask if the user wants to continue.  Timesharing users 
might want an option to tell programs to continue (maybe an environment variable?).

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Thornton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 11:43 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Memory access faults.


On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 13:32, Fargusson.Alan wrote:

> The problem with laying this at the feet of the application programmer
> is that they are not perfect, and when the program fails it actually
> the end user that suffers.

Yes, but do you have a better suggestion?

I mean, in the common case, you got this error because somewhere,
there's a pointer that's pointing at something that's not yours to read
(or write).  Probably that's an application error; maybe it's a hardware
failure.  In any event, what *is* the correct behavior?

You certainly don't want to give bad data to the end user.  You don't
want to give him whatever happens to be at that address, since it almost
certainly isn't what he really wants and if he uses it he's basing a
decision on bad information.  What *do* you do other than say, "Uh, this
program tried to go grab hold of the wrong thing; please report a bug" ?

Adam

Reply via email to