Adventure - the answer to what went wrong?

Richard Wallman
2002-12-12T19:11:11Z

Gave it a bit of thought today, and I think I know what happened.

Looking at the libc sources, it looks like the strcmp and strncmp
functions assume that both strings are in the same 64Kb segment. (There
may be other functions that make this assumption as well, but I haven't
really looked).

Looking at the file sizes, the "advent" program is 84Kb when compiled
using bcc.

I put forward the theory that it fails because the two strings are not
in the same 64Kb segment. The reason no-one has found this problem
before is that so far all of the binaries have been <64Kb in size.

Still, looks like it's been fixed now, but if anyone was wondering why
their port of their favourite app failed, that may be the reason.
--
Richard Wallman