On 26 Feb 98 at 9:51, david j lover wrote:

> can some explain what does access violation and stack overflow.  my
> system confriguation is the following: p100, 2.5hd, 64meg memory, svga
> card, 56k modem, ditto tape backup, and 3 1/2 floppy.
> just recently upgraded memory from 32 to 64.

  "Access violation" -- code tried to use memory that it had not
first obtained access to.  This usually means that a "pointer" -- a
variable containing an address -- had an invalid value.  This value
may have been received, unchecked, from some other piece of software;
video drivers have historically been frequent culprits, and obtaining
and installing latest drivers for your card has often been known to
clear up such problems.

  "Stack Overflow" -- The stack is a region where code stores
parameters being passed to functions, return addresses, and temporary
data; the space available in this area of this process has been
exceeded.  There are two common scenarios:  large data (picture
bitmaps?) getting passed by value rather than by reference [code that
does this so much it causes problems shouldn't make it to
release...], or massive recursion (function calls itself, which calls
itself, and so on) [code that does this so much it causes problems
shouldn't make it to release...]  That leaves excessive temporary
data; the size of temporary data may have been received, unchecked,
from some other piece of software; if this isn't valid, it may
randomly happen to be huge.

  There's no obvious reason why upgrading RAM should cause these to
suddenly start happening, but it's possible that procedures that have
been returning random garbage all along may have started returning
*different* random garbage.

David G