Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!sungod!davidsen From: davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (ody) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: effect of free(...) Message-ID: <1678@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Date: 15 Aug 89 13:37:17 GMT References: <33994@apple.Apple.COM> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY Lines: 16 In article <33994@apple.Apple.COM> landon@Apple.COM (Landon Dyer) writes: | "Foo!" you cry, "It works FINE on my FrobCo Unix(tm) machine!" | | Super. It won't work anywhere else, and it might stop working on YOUR | machine tomorrow. DO IT RIGHT. Actually the problem is it won't work *everywhere* else. Use of free'd space is a certain way to non-portability. And, since the topic was brounght up, if you do a lot of malloc and free there is a good chance that the data will be modified by the free when garbage collection turns two adjacent small free blocks into one large block. I actually got bitten by this once, when a typo resulted in use of the wrong pointer. bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM) {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me