R devel - May 2002 - (PR#1604) Re: Platform-specific: simple assignments in Rprofile

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Prof Brian D Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 28 May 2002 NEFTH@pacbell.net wrote:
>
> > This only happens on platforms with a faulty implementation
> > of realloc(). Some C libraries do not allow realloc() to be
> > called with a NULL pointer to resize.
>
> What other platforms give the problem?
>
> The behaviour R assumes is required by the ISO C89 standard (at least
> according to Lewine's book). Would it not be better to fix realloc
rather
> than R: there are many alternative implementations of malloc out there (and
> R uses one for Windows).
>
> One issue is that realloc is used in several R packages on CRAN, and
> quite possibly in others.  These are likely to assume standard-conformant
> behaviour.  (It is used in other places within the R sources too, but I
> assume you checked all of those.)
There are several other uses of realloc in the R sources with the same
assumption ....

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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