RE: [MI400] Space pointers

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The way you describe ALLOC and DEALLOC is pretty much an industry standard
from what I've seen and so wouldn't, IMO, be considered "quirky" in RPG
unless you consider them quirky in all languages.

> - ALLOC doesn't provide an option to initialize the storage during
> allocation. This makes for some interesting bugs if the programmer reads
> back more data than he wrote to the heap.

True.  No alloc I've seen does this, although I'm kinda hazy on Basic's
implementations.  Easy enough to write a wrapper around RPGs ALLOC for this
though to initialize the data without having to code an MI ALLOC.

> - DEALLOC forces you to remember to add the  (N) opcode extender in order
to
> automatically set the pointer to NULL. At the very least, shouldn't this
> have been the default? After all, why would you let a programmer maintain
a
> valid pointer to heap storage that you've just freed? Maybe there's a good
> reason for it, but I've yet to run across it.

DEALLOC has an (N) extender?  Nice.  C/C++ doesn't have anything like that
far as I know.  I have to set it to NULL myself.

> - Error reporting is very primitive. Status 426 - error in storage
> management operation, is not exactly informative.

About the only real error I know of with ALLOC is not enough memory to alloc
what I want.  Nothing else even comes to mind.

With DEALLOC the only error I know of is that the pointer given is not a
pointer to ALLOCed memory.

Regards,

Jim Langston