Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]
| From | Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | comp.lang.c |
| Subject | Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? |
| Date | 2016-12-15 08:21 +0000 |
| Organization | Fix this later |
| Message-ID | <o2tjms$j66$1@dont-email.me> (permalink) |
| References | (6 earlier) <1b1sxauo96.fsf@pfeifferfamily.net> <o2skdb$cfs$1@dont-email.me> <1btwa6t4ij.fsf@pfeifferfamily.net> <o2soqd$och$1@dont-email.me> <15d01b7c-4020-4e03-b8e4-8dd5399d6bf3@googlegroups.com> |
On 15/12/16 01:05, supercat@casperkitty.com wrote: > On Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 6:42:16 PM UTC-6, Richard Heathfield wrote: >> Or you might as well not bother testing, which is what I suspect happens >> most of the time. And that's why Linux software is so hopeless. Not as >> hopeless as Windows software, obviously --- but still pretty hopeless. >> Look! Shiny! > > There are many kinds of application that won't be able to do anything useful > unless all of their malloc() calls succeed. I think that depends on what you mean by "application". If you just mean "program", I agree. But nowadays, it's probably fair to say that "application" means "event-driven, interactive program" - word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, desktop publishing programs, music editors, arts packages, photographic editors, and all the rest of it. And these programs certainly can continue to be useful even if some of their malloc calls fail. If a photo editor, say, can't open a photograph because it's too darn huge, I'd appreciate being told that in a dialog window that I can dismiss to carry on working on some other photos, rather than being told it by the crashing of the application before I have so much as a chance to save my work. > In such applications, having > allocation failures force an abnormal program termination may be more helpful > than having them return null (requiring that every malloc() call check its > result and--if null--force an abnormal program termination). Useful and convenient to the programmer, maybe, but not even remotely useful to the user, and it is the user to whom the program is /supposed/ to be useful. As for checking the result of malloc and then deliberately aborting if it's NULL, well, that's precisely the kind of thinking that leads to the flaky applications we have to use every day because we lack the several hundred person-years of spare time it would take to go and fix all the source code. > Abnormal program termination is hardly elegant, but if a program isn't going > to be able to behave usefully, the value of avoiding an APE may be limited. Abnormal program termination isn't just inelegant. It's very often a sign of lazy and thoughtless programming. It's fine for debugging and testing, but it has no place in production code. -- Richard Heathfield Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk "Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999 Sig line 4 vacant - apply within
Back to comp.lang.c | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread
Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? DFS <nospam@dfs.com> - 2016-12-13 23:18 -0500
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Melzzzzz <mel@zzzzz.com> - 2016-12-14 05:30 +0100
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? mark.bluemel@gmail.com - 2016-12-14 00:59 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-14 10:38 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? DFS <nospam@dfs.com> - 2016-12-14 12:53 -0500
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-14 18:05 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> - 2016-12-14 11:57 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-14 20:05 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? "James R. Kuyper" <jameskuyper@verizon.net> - 2016-12-14 15:21 -0500
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> - 2016-12-14 12:28 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? supercat@casperkitty.com - 2016-12-14 13:09 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Jean-Marc Bourguet <jm@bourguet.org> - 2016-12-14 22:53 +0100
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2016-12-14 15:47 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2016-12-14 15:41 -0700
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-14 23:26 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2016-12-14 17:33 -0700
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-15 00:42 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? supercat@casperkitty.com - 2016-12-14 17:05 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-15 08:21 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? supercat@casperkitty.com - 2016-12-15 09:15 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-15 17:50 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? supercat@casperkitty.com - 2016-12-15 12:15 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-15 20:37 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? raltbos@xs4all.nl (Richard Bos) - 2016-12-15 20:08 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2016-12-14 20:40 -0700
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-15 08:36 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2016-12-15 17:43 -0700
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2016-12-16 01:05 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2016-12-15 18:34 -0700
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2016-12-15 10:14 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? raltbos@xs4all.nl (Richard Bos) - 2016-12-15 20:15 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Tim Rentsch <txr@alumni.caltech.edu> - 2016-12-15 01:51 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? asetofsymbols@gmail.com - 2016-12-15 06:09 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Tim Rentsch <txr@alumni.caltech.edu> - 2016-12-15 17:47 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> - 2016-12-14 12:15 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2016-12-15 10:24 -0800
Re: overcommit is the plague Noob <root@127.0.0.1> - 2016-12-17 01:17 +0100
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2016-12-14 20:19 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? DFS <nospam@dfs.com> - 2016-12-14 17:44 -0500
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2016-12-15 00:21 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? mark.bluemel@gmail.com - 2016-12-15 00:56 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2016-12-15 22:08 +0000
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Geoff <geoff@invalid.invalid> - 2016-12-14 13:39 -0800
Re: Why is this outputting alternate blank lines? Ike Naar <ike@iceland.freeshell.org> - 2016-12-16 07:12 +0000
csiph-web