[geeks] Win32 malloc/free internals, and a unix question.

Tom Borton tborton at usa.net
Thu Aug 8 19:31:15 CDT 2002


I wish I could say I were surprised, but I'm not.  My parchment is 10 years
old (also accredited), and there wasn't much of that then.  I picked for my
advisor a guy who had worked building robots before teaching, taught the x86
assembly language class, and had as much fun with computers outside of class
as in.  "Real World" (tm - Dave McGuire) stuff rather than endless droning on
the theory of computers.  He knew PCs and the Atari Portfolio inside and out
and is probably the main reason I still develop software on PCs (job security
= writing apps for fsck'ed OS).  Doesn't change the fact that I firmly believe
that SPARC/NeXT/Mac/HP/IBM are all more stable platforms[1], just that my
love/hate for PCs started first.

Favorite clueless student moment from the x86 assembly language class:
	Prof:	"The 8086 chip does not include floating point instructions."
	Student:	"You're wrong.  I can build a program using floating point in
Borland Pascal and it runs fine on an 8086."

Tom

[1] Favorite job was writing imaging and robotics control software using
SS2->VME->vxWorks and building manuals in FrameMaker on a Mac IIfx; I'm not a
/total/ Wintel drone.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-admin at sunhelp.org
> [mailto:geeks-admin at sunhelp.org]On Behalf
> Of Joshua D Boyd
> Sent: 08 August 2002 20:01
> To: geeks at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Win32 malloc/free internals, and a unix question.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 07:20:28PM -0400, Tom Borton wrote:
> > <pendantic>
> > As a general rule, dynamically allocated storage should always be
> > de-allocated within the same scope that it was allocated.
> > </pendantic>
> > Sorry, I've just finished arguing with a programmer who doesn't
> > understand that rule, even when the debugger reports unreleased
> > memory.  Grrr...
>
> Note, this is not something that they teach at my school in the CS
> department, which is an accredited CS program.  They never even teach
> debugger usage.
>
> --
> Joshua D. Boyd
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks



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