davy (11/26/82)
#N:pur-ee:15600002:000:1533
pur-ee!davy Nov 25 13:44:00 1982
Here at Purdue, we have a LOT of inexperienced users who are
learning to program. Most of them spend the better part of the
semester using Pascal, and the Berkeley "pi/px" programs. However,
toward the end of the semester, these students begin using Fortran.
There is also a 5 week course which teaches 'C'.
The nice thing about the "pi/px" programs is that they are
very user friendly. They catch all your errors, and tell you exactly
what line your program died on, etc. Not so when running 'C' and
Fortran. There is no catching of signals, etc., and the poor novice
user is left to decipher what has just happened to his program.
To get to the point, I'm curious as to how other people on the
net explain the following "core dumped" messages to inexperienced
users. I am looking for general explanations, such as "segmentation
fault usually means you subscripted an array illegally". While that
explanation may not be entirely correct, it usually gets the general
idea across, and the user can go fix his program.
These are the messages I would like your "canned" explanations
for:
Bus Error
Memory Fault
IOT/EMT Trap (not sure if this one exists)
Trace/BPT Trap
Floating Exception
Segmentation Fault
Illegal Instruction
Please MAIL your answers to:
decvax!pur-ee!davy
ucbvax!pur-ee!davy
ihnss!pur-ee!davy
harpo!pur-ee!davy
If there is sufficient interest, I'll post a summary to the net.
--Dave Curry
pur-ee!davy