Re: VMS

On 2025-06-21, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:07:20 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:
>

Very likely, but the idea was to protect the typical programmer from
their own common mistakes (of not carefully checking error return codes
or buffer lengths, etc.).  I.e. the typical 9-5 contract programmer, not
the Dennis Ritchie's of the world.

>
I'm paranoid enough that I check the return of malloc and try to log the
problem even though I'm probably screwed at that point. It has pointed out
errors for calloc if you've manged to come up with a negative size.
>
I have worked with programmers that assumed nothing bad would ever happen.
Sadly, some had years of experience.

Some years ago, I heard of a bug related to use of malloc.  The
code had _intended_ to dynamically allocate storage for a string
and the terminating null byte.  It was _intended_ to do this:

        dest = malloc(strlen(src)+1);

Instead, a paren was misplaced:

        dest = malloc(strlen(src))+1;

IIUC, the next line copied the src string into the newly-
allocated destination.

Those who had worked on that project longer said the bug had been
latent in the code for several years, most likely with alignment
padding masking the bug from being discovered.  Curiously, the
bug made itself manifest immediately upon changing from a 32-bit
build environment to a 64-bit build environment.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)