On 29/10/2007, Joshua Juran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2007, at 8:28 AM, Klaas-Jan Stol wrote:
>
> > hi, when building parrot it reported a warning about some variable
> > "string"
> > in string.c
> > When checking out, I saw this:
> >
> > static const char *
> > nonnull_encoding_name(STRING *s)
> > {
> > char *string;
> > if (!s)
> > strcpy(string, "null string");
> > else
> > strcpy(string, s->encoding->name);
> >
> > return string;
> > }
> >
> > Can this be right?
>
> No, it can't.
>
> > I thought that the first argument to strcpy needs to
> > point to some memory, but "string" (which really should be renamed
> > I think,
>
> Shouldn't be a problem if you're not 'using namespace std;'. I use
> 'string' as a variable name in my C++ programs without ill effect.
>
> > as it might cause trouble when compiling it using a C++ compiler)
> > is not
> > even initialized.
>
> You're quite right -- the listed code is bonkers. If you're lucky,
> you'll get a segfault attempting to write to unmapped memory.
This was pointed out by leo++ on #parrot who then described a far more
elegant solution which was committed to the repo not long afterwards
in r22563.
Paul
