[Dev-C++] Computers, chaos, and the supernatural

[Devin C. <dcc...@ya...>]

> >   Yes.  But then again I've also had the compiler telling me
> > there are undefined escape sequences in the middle of
> > comments.  (That one
> > went away after a reboot.)
>
> Never had similar problems. Not even once.

  My response was, "Cool.  I broke its brain."

> >   I've gotten the compiler to act in weird ways more than once.  If
> > others aren't having similar problems, then I suspect my system is
> > possessed.  (Dev-C++ won't work on my other machine, a Win95
> > 486; everything it compiles crashes.)
>
> ! Never had any slight problem. It may be a virus.

  That hypothesis has the virtue of not having to resort to the
supernatural.
I generally don't have much trouble with anything else, though, and I've
worked on other machines with individual quirks.  If this is a virus it's a
very subtle (and specific) one.
  It's possible some of my problems are caused by a) a large project and
b) very little RAM (24 M.)  With all the read/writes to the disk,
something's bound to go awry.  Many of the symptoms also (see below)
seem to indicate a memory leak.

> Either you do programming mistakes, either you have hardware
> or virus problem.

  I had Dev-C++ crash a compile on me yesterday (I can't
remember the exact title, but it referred to DEVCPP.EXE.)  I
tried again and it went perfectly well.  I also had an untraceable
ambiguous reference; I changed the name of the function and
things were fine.  (The compiler said the function, scaffold(void)
was first defined in stl_vector.h, but a search found no trace of
such an animal.  The debugger kept taking me to a line in bstring,
which also seemed to lack any function called scaffold().)

Devin's Computational Chaos Theory :
  I don't believe that computers are the entirely deterministic
systems they seem to be.  Like the Newtonian universe, there
are hard-and-fast laws explaining behaviour.  But in any complex
system chaos sets in.  Maybe someone misset a system
parameter when the system was set up two years ago.  Maybe a
sector on the disk is wonky, and that's where the machine puts its
cache.  All of these things build over time, and though each and
every one they has a -reason-, they are still -inexplicable-.  You
could go into the machine and break things down and explain
everything, but that's not practical.  So these bugs remain
inexplicable and, for all purposes, randomly caused.
  1) All systems increase in buggyness with respect to time and their
complexity.
  2) All of these bugs have natural causes.
  3) Many of these bugs will require an inordinate amount of effort
and skill to trace.
  4) Therefore, these are (practically) supernaturally caused.

> Doesn't the following code execute properly at your system?

  Dunno.  I have noticed that if certain things start going wrong,
e.g., the error messages from the compiler come out garbled,
that's a sign things might get worse.  When the only error message
is garbled, that's the time to reboot the machine.  The gradual
onset, with the problem solved by rebooting, makes me suspect a
memory management problem.

--Devin


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