[Swarm-Support] gcc and messages to nil. I'm needing help

[Paul Johnson]

In the recent past, Swarm programs would stop with an error if a message 
was sent to nil. 

Now, In Fedora Core 4 and 5, gcc-4.X, the behavior of the compiler has 
been changed. I think now it matches the behavior described in the 
Objective-C book that Apple circulates, which holds that messages to nil 
do not produce a warning or error.  This causes bad bad problems for 
me/us.  One problem, which we discovered last month, is that even when 
Swarm's init fails to create lispArchiver and lispAppArchiver, the 
program continues and generates some bogus outcomes.  Now I noticed 
while working on an FC4 system that an improperly created distribution 
was resulting in a nil, and then repeated calls for "getDoubleSample" 
were returning crap, but no warnings or errors.

So I wish I could make gcc behave like it did in the old days, so that a 
program would stop and tell us when a message is sent to a nil.  And 
where in the code it happens. 

pj

--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
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