Re: Something is stepping on something

In article <61j175F1svdtbU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Paul Russell <prussell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Robert Peirce wrote:

Folks, please give me a break. This stuff is legacy software, written
over 30 years ago and changed only enough to port it to new machines.
In this case I did make that change and the code works properly

[resume snipped]


It wasn't meant to be a criticism, just a suggestion. You should never
assume anything about the layout of variables in memory - it can change
not only between different machines and different compilers but also
between different builds (e.g. if you change compiler switches). Rather
than repeatedly "fixing" these problems on an ad hoc basis you could
just invest a little time making the code more robust - it would
probably be a net win in the long run.

I second both the "it is just a suggestion", and the "still, I repeat
that suggestion" parts. This does not have to mean staring for hours at
the source. There are tools that can help here, such as clint
(<http://sourceforge.net/projects/clint/>) and/or valgrind
(<http://valgrind.org/>) variant. The things these tools report might
even help you solve some "it crashes once in a while", "the results look
odd once in a while" or "it does not work when I enable compiler
optimization" issues.

Reinder
.

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