🚀 go-pugleaf

When I was TAing/teaching a class, I once had a student turn in his
hardcopy, with the disk with the softcopy stapled to it..

In article <DAVEG.90S...@near.cs.caltech.edu>, da...@near.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes...
>How many times have we all warned beginning programmers to cross their
>t's and dot their i's:  "Store through an uninitialized pointer, and
>the computer could do anything---it could even run amok and delete all
>your files!"
> 
>Okay, folks:  Have you ever had a bug in an innocent little program
>that really did delete all your files?  Reformat the hard disk?  Send
>rude mail to your mother?  (Well, probably not that.)

I did.  Back when I was learning C, and didn't yet fully understand arrays,
pointers, and multidimensional variable-length combinations of the above, I
wrote a test program that did some massive NULL and near-NULL dereferencing.
When I ran it, the hard disk light went on and stayed on, I think it clunked
a little while, and hung.  After power cycling, the machine refused to boot.
I think we had to re-format the HD and reload from backups.

As I recall, it was a PC-AT with DOS (and Xenix, which went unused); the
compiler was Lattice's of about five years ago.

I'm better now, thanks.

-- Frederick.
-------------------------<< Frederick G.M. Roeber >>--------------------------
roe...@caltech.edu or | Bat. 864, 2-A18 | Disclaimer:  Are you kidding?  If
roeber@caltech.bitnet | CERN, SL Div.   | more people shared my opinions, the
  +41 22 767 53 73    | Geneva, Switz.  | world would be a much happier place!
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