[MUD-Dev] Re: Modular MUD [Was:Finer points of Telnet progra

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 25 Aug 98, Adam J. Thornton wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 25, 1998 at 06:03:05PM -0700, Caliban Tiresias Darklock
> wrote:
> > "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..." Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't
> > stray pointers something you shouldn't have in the first place? Every
> > argument I've heard for W9x being a bad platform comes down to "If you
> > screw up, bad things happen". Well, call me arrogant, but I say just don't
> > screw up.
> 
> I'm not smart enough to write real programs without screwing up. 
> And I like it when my mistakes don't make me have to reboot, and I
> just get "Segmentation Violation [core dumped]", and then I can
> debug using the core file and my executable, and realize that I
> passed in the value stored at some place rather than its address, or
> something like that.

Nod.  I also screw up often and I get the exact same error, except 
a dialog box pops up that says a "A page-fault exception has occurred 
at 0x0cfe004e in kernel32.exe".  Then I click the just-in-time 
debugging button and my source window, assembly pane and call stack 
window pop up.  Double-click on the last function called on the 
stack and usually the offending source line is staring me in the 
face.  Ah, but I simplify, I usually try to code more devious and 
subtle pointer errors.  ;)  

> And with a modular, extensible framework, where you can't
> necessarily control the quality of the code being run, well, I'd be
> really wary of running it in an environment that didn't rigorously
> enforce process isolation. 

Well... I'm not inclined to venture into debugging the libs or dlls 
supplied with my OS or compiler.  I don't have access to the source 
code nor do I have the time to fix their code.  I'd rather send the 
vendor some hate E-mail and demand they supply a workaround or fix 
for the problem.   

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