File Pro And Bus Errors

[J. Ryan Kelley]

J. Ryan Kelley wrote:

> Good Morning,
>
> I've been working with Filepro for about 8 months now after recently 
> graduating from college with a degree in Computer Science.  I've had 
> experiences working with everything from C, and C++ to Fortran, to 
> Lisp, and countless other languages, however never with FilePro until 
> I started at my current position.  When I first started working with 
> Filepro, I'll admit, I was impressed with how easy it was to step in 
> and start working.  In fact, I was doing some programming in my first 
> few hours on my first day.  The primary thing that I have found 
> unsettling from day one, however, is the presence of the dreaded Bus 
> Error.  I'm quite familiar with Bus Errors (aka Segmentation Faults) 
> from my days working in C, where attempting to access a memory 
> location you don't have permissions to access would cause this problem 
> and dump you out.  It was usually caused by an improperly indexed 
> array, or an erroneous pointer.  This all made sense in C because of 
> how low level it was, giving you direct access to the memory.
> Filepro, at least relative to C, is much more high level.  There is no 
> point at which you are attempting to manipulate the system memory 
> directly so these Bus Errors should cease to exist, unless being 
> caused by a compiler/interpreter.  When I've questioned co-workers and 
> other filepro developers in the past about what causes these errors, 
> and how they can be avoided, I always get one reply, "Remove your 
> comments."  When I was first told this, I disputed it, and disputed 
> it.  After all, in all (or at least i thought all) 
> compilers/interpreters comments are completely disregarded and treated 
> as if they were simply white space.  Sadly, I have seen several 
> instances in which removing some comments can remedy these errors.  In 
> my opinion, comments are a very important part of the code itself, 
> especially when working in a system with several developers who need 
> to be able to easily digest what another programmer was attempting to 
> do.  For a comment to attempt to access an unauthorized memory 
> location is illogical, and I'm assuming that there is a better 
> explanation for all of this.  As the days wear on, the bus errors seem 
> to become more and more prevalent and are creating some serious issues 
> that take me away from my daily duties.  Can anyone provide some 
> helpful insight onto this problem, do comments really cause Bus 
> Errors?  If So why and how?  Is there a patch in the works? and what 
> else in FilePro can cause these nasty errors.
>
> Thank you,
>
One of the suggestions that was given to me to track down the source of 
these bus errors was to run the code through dclerk w/ the -db argument 
to debug to see exactly where these bus errors are occuring, oddly 
enough most (if not all) of these bus errors are occuring before debug 
even begins to go through any of the code, yet if I run debug with out 
input processing (-z xxyyzzz) all goes well.  Any ideas?

Thanks

-- 
J. Ryan Kelley