On Friday 08 October 2004 17:27, Saikrishna Dasari wrote:
Hi Alain,
May I know the logic behind the following statement on receiver side when it receives the slices? what exactly is the use of slice magic?
#define MAGIC 0x41424344
Thanks,
Sai
This is a number that is put into the slice structure in order to guard against pointer errors (or rather: detect these errors early). If due to some internal SNAFU, a variable of type slice* would point to a memory location that was not actually a slice struct, the error would be detected as soon as the pointer would be used (because the magic number would not match), rather than to allow it to propagate further.
Catching such errors early makes it easyer to find the exact place where the error happens, and makes debugging easyer.
Alain