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> The article is about C++, and using "magic" memory addresses doesn't seem at all what I'd expect to be the default way to handle division by zero. They're not saying this is, like, a portable standard way to handle division by zero in C++. You're right that it would be undefined behaviour under the standard (but a C++ compiler for real-mode x86 would be expected to support it, at least implicitly; obviously this specific case is not a particularly useful, but C++ is used in embedded settings and setting a custom interrupt handler is something its users want and expect). A decent, well-behaved language would do some kind of structured error handling on divide by zero, like throwing an exception. IMO that includes any C++ compiler worth bothering with (though again the standard makes it undefined behaviour so it's possible that some compilers don't). But, the way the runtime of such a decent C++ compiler would actually implement that would be by setting up an interrupt handler for the divide by zero interrupt (that would contain code to construct the exception etc.), and by performing this write to address 0 you're overwriting (the pointer to) that interrupt handler. So, this line of code would cause your program to behave (almost certainly) badly on the next division by zero, even if you were using a well-behaved C++ compiler that normally handled division by zero gracefully. (OTOH with a maliciously pedantic C++ compiler that division by zero would already be undefined behaviour, so in practice, since most C++ compilers tend to be maliciously pedantic, you might be no worse off than you were before that line). The original post you replied to was just talking about the somewhat interesting details of what would actually happen because of the quirks of what these addresses are used for on that hardware (e.g. the fact that address 0 is supposed to contain a pointer to the handler, so by setting it to 0 you cause the CPU to start executing the interrupt handler table as code, is kind of interesting - not as a point about C++, but as a point about funny emergent behaviour of hardware), not about what this is specified as doing or the normal way of doing things in C++. I don't know why you were downvoted. |
What got missed though, is ther has to be an "unused"/"reserve" bit(s) space in order for things to run without requiring additional specific hardware operations.