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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C23 thoughts and opinions
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2024 03:15:58 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 20:42:47 -0500, BGB wrote:

> I fairly promptly fixed this bug once discovered, and am then just left
> to wonder how exactly it managed to work in the first place (or didn't
> break already).

Been there, done that.

When I set about to revive the then-moribund NCSA Telnet code for 
Macintosh, back around 1990, it looked like it had been abandoned because 
nobody had the stomach to do the porting from MPW C v2 (created for Apple 
by Green Hills) to v3 (developed by Apple itself, thoroughly ANSI-
compliant).

Besides all the compile-time errors, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of 
places to be checked for the different, incompatible definition of the 
Pascal-equivalent “Str255” type, to ensure there were no lurking bugs. I 
think I got them all.

Then I started up my build, got as far as opening a terminal session, 
closed it again, quit ... and the app crashed.

I discovered that the shutdown loop to ensure all open sessions were 
closed before quitting had an off-by-1 error in its termination condition: 
it was accessing an element in the array of open sessions that didn’t 
exist. Somehow this never manifested a problem with the old C compiler, 
but it did with the new one.

By the way, that MPW C v3 compiler had some quite amusing error messages. 
Various people (including myself) independently posted lists of them (and 
once I got accused of plagiarizing the list from someone else--as though 
someone had made them up). Quite a few people couldn’t believe such 
messages were real.