Grads scripting language

[Patrice Dumas]

> I believe segmentation faults dependes a lot on system
> environment and memory managment of the program. I
> think grads needs to improve upon the memory
> managment.

Here is my understanding of the segfault (from wandering on the net, may
be wrong).
Most of the time a segfault may mean 2 things. Either there is a
binary incompatibility between a library binary interface grads was
compiled against, and the binary interface of the library dynamically
linked with grads. Or there is a bug in the grads code, with an access to
another process memory, the more common (not for grads, but in general)
being an access out of an array bound. The segfault will happen as soon as
the memory accessed isn't in the grads process address space, so it may
be different accross operating systems and compiler versions.

In your case it seems that it is an illegal access to memory.
If it is reproducible, it is possible to find in which function it happened
by providing a backtrace. For that, grads should be compiled with
debugging symbols, and you should run grace in a debugger (I know of gdb),
like

gdb gradsdods
(gdb) run
... caught signal, segmentation fault
(gdb) bt

--
Pat