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

[Ioannis V. <no...@ya...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev...@li... 
> [mailto:dev...@li...] On Behalf 
> Of Devin Carless
> Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 4:19 PM
> To: dev...@li...
> Subject: [Dev-C++] Computers, chaos, and the supernatural
> 
> 
>   My response was, "Cool.  I broke its brain."

:))


>   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.
> 
> 
>   I had Dev-C++ crash a compile on me yesterday (I can't 
> remember the exact title, but it referred to DEVCPP.EXE.)  I 


Yes it crashes some rare times after many recompilations.


> 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 


Perhaps that function was used inside the implementation file which is
probably precompiled.


> 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.


Now you have come across me there is no way that your machine will keep
doing such things and escape untouched (what a statement!). I *strongly*
suuspect you have memory problems.

I am sending you attached (and to all in the list) memtest-86 which i
consider as the best memory testing program. It is freeware. Run it and
tell me the results (let it run all the default tests).


> > 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.

After performing the memory test and find memory problems, uninstall &
reinstalll Dev-C++  together with the latest version of MINGW
(http://www.mingw.org).


Keep me informed of the results.


Ioannis
 
* Ioannis Vranos
* Programming pages: http://www.noicys.d2g.com
* Alternative URL: http://run.to/noicys