3 ms·
The specification states that "your routine should modify the given zero-terminated string in place". This implies that a zero-terminated string is passed in, a
by bdonlan 16y ago
The specification states that "your routine should modify the given zero-terminated string in place". This implies that a zero-terminated string is passed in, and that it is mutable. If this is not the case, it is impossible to perform as specified; any behavior is wrong. An assertion error would be the ideal way to handle things; an immediate segfault is almost as good (and probably the practical thing to do if the string is immutable or not null-terminated). And of course, there are some error situations you simply can't detect - eg, not all cases of non-terminated strings are detectable, because you run into and mutate some other heap garbage before hitting an unmapped or immutable page.
- jacquesm 16y agoI think it is actually really cool that RoG did not specify that part of the problem because in real life that is exactly how stuff gets specified, and plenty of times that's where the trouble comes from. Asking to revise a spec so that it is explicit is usually a very good course of action. Not all hardware will segfault when writing to NULL, the immutable should segfault and strings that are not null terminated are indeed hard to impossible to check for (pointer wrap..., after a lot of swapping, or a stack overwrite).