Correction, a[33]

[Evan Bigall]

In article <2737 at helios.ee.lbl.gov> envbvs at epb2 (Brian V. Smith) writes:
>In article <17763 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>>Similarly, &b[7] could legally be at the end of memory, pointing to nothing
>>dereferencable; all that's required is that &b[7] can be computed and stored
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Please excuse my ignorance, but I've seen this word many times now, and it's
>not in Webster's.
>be referenced", but de-referencable?
>What does "dereferencable" mean? I could see "referencable", meaning "can

Informally, remember that addresses are often called pointers.  The verb 
"to derefrence" referrs to the action of `following' the pointer to see what
it points at.  ie: what is the contents of that particular address in memory.

>From a more formal perspective * is the derefrence operator in C.  From K&R 89

	The unary operator * treats its operand as the address of the ultimate
        target, and accesses that address to fetch the contents.

So, what Chris means (imho) is that it is possible to have a legal pointer that
points to the end of memory (or just the end of a segment) but have * fail 
(coredump).

Does that help? 
-- 
Evan Bigall, Plexus Computers, San Jose, CA (408)943-2283 ...!sun!plx!evan
"I barely have the authority to speak for myself, certainly not anybody else"