time(0L) - history of a misconception (was Re: SCO password generator)

David Fiander david at sco.COM
Mon May 27 23:47:36 AEST 1991


In article <1991May24.151350.22705 at holos0.uucp> lbr at holos0.uucp (Len Reed) writes:
>
>You're certainly right that a NULL that produced a virtual memory fault
>upon any use would be better than a virtual zero address.  But it's not
>the "compiler people" who would have to agree to this.  Far too much
>existing code would be broken by a move to this, I'm afraid.

No, all I have to do is convince the compiler people.  They don't
particularly care if somebody else's broken code breaks; just ask anybody
that has worked on an optimizer.  Most of the bugs reported against
HCR-PCO (the Portable Code Optimizer) turned out to be bugs in the
application source which worked until an agressive optimizer hacked the
code into something else.



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