On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 10:49:05AM -0800, Fargusson.Alan wrote: | If I may ramble on a bit: one thing I have noticed is that all | systems I have worked with have one common problem, which is | programs that try to access memory regions outside of the | allocated virtual memory for the process. On Windows this | results in the famous general protection fault, on Unix it | results in the famous segmentation fault, and on z/OS it is the | famous SOC4. I wonder if there isn't a better way to deal with | this problem then just aborting the program. Users find this | problem really annoying.
I thought that was S0C4. Well, there's aborting the programmer :-) Seriously, lower level languages (those with pointers and addresses) should be left to those who have lower level experience (e.g. have done assembler). Higher level applications languages (Java, C#, Pike, Python, and others) have built in protection for this kind of problem, and in some cases specific non-failure behaviour (maybe good or bad). When programmers tend to think too abstractly about a problem, they tend to forget the details. Then they need something to handle those details for them. OTOH, when programming, I tend to consider those details all the time. That lets me avoid this kind of crash. But it also takes me out of the running programming higher level applications. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ | | (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
