Memory may be damaged (was Re: variable names and order)

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu>wrote:

>  On 3/19/2012 12:25 AM, Tamas Papp wrote:
>
> Maybe I stumbled into this accidentally, but I am a bit surprised that it
> is so easy to get Maxima into a situation where "memory may be damaged". I
> don't know much about Maxima's internals, but since it is built on CL,
> normally I would just expect a some condition with restarts as the worst
> case. Are these fatal errors a GCL thing? Would it help if I ran Maxima on
> top of, say, SBCL? Best, Tamas
>
> "memory may be damaged"  but it may not be any part of memory you are
> going to be using anyway.
> And it may not be damaged at all.
>
> If you were using C, you might not get such a message, just a system crash.
>
> Typically a lisp compiler will have different levels of optimization, and
> optimizing for speed (speed=3)
> may mean that error (such as incorrect type declarations) will not be
> caught at runtime.
>

I think there used to be quite a bit of code compiled with speed=3 and
safety=0.  The safety=0 is pretty bad if you're not careful to check that
things are what you think they are.

Ray