#519 Data corruption in variables

[William Kredentser]

I am seeing some very strange corruption in variables during execution of a script. Here's a fragment of an execution trace to illustrate what I'm seeing.

64 *-*   Say Nominee
   >V>     ""
   *-*   Say Token
   >V>     "Hollywood"
   *-*   Say Workstring
   >V>     "Ash "

I have inserted 3 SAY requests in my script to display the contents of the 3 variables I'm focussing on. This shows their values at this point within the process (which is an extract from a log that is about 100,000 lines long).

The next thing is this function call:

65 *-*   Token = Upper(Token, 1, 1)    /* Make sure the initial letter is upper case */
   >V>     "Hollywood"
   >L>     "1"
   >L>     "1"
   >F>     "Hollywood"

Everything looks good. This function touches one of the 3 variables in question, leaving the other 2 untouched. After this, I've got my 3 SAY requests again:

66 *-*   Say Nominee
   >V>     ""
   *-*   Say Token
   >V>     "Hollywood"
   *-*   Say Workstring
   >V>     "Ash             Ash     ÐŒõ            àŒõ            ðŒõ             õ            õ        "

Without making any reference to my variable named Workstring in my Upper function, suddenly it has grown a tail of junk. Here's the next 2 statements executed in the script. They're actually irrelevant to the issue but I feel like I should show them just so you don't think I'm editing things to suit my case.

67 *-*   If Token = "St" Then Token = "St."
   >V>     "Hollywood"
   >L>     "St"
   >O>     "0"
68 *-*   WorkString = WorkString||Token||" "  /* Insert the space back in that Parse removes */
   >V>     "Ash             Ash     ÐŒõ            àŒõ            ðŒõ             õ            õ        "
   >V>     "Hollywood"
   >O>     "Ash             Ash     ÐŒõ            àŒõ            ðŒõ             õ            õ        Hollywood"
   >L>     " "
   >O>     "Ash             Ash     ÐŒõ            àŒõ            ðŒõ             õ            õ        Hollywood "

And then I dump my 3 variables again:

69 *-*   Say Nominee
   >V>     ""
   *-*   Say Token
   >V>     "Hollywoo`"
   *-*   Say Workstring
   >V>     "Ash             Ash     ÐŒõ            àŒõ            ðŒõ             õ            õ        Hollywood "

As you can see, the variable named Token has now got some corruption in it. The final character "d" has been overlaid with a junk character.

This is very disturbing.

[Bruce]

Unable to reproduce on 32bit Linux.