14.5 Undetected failure

An undetected failure is a failure that the Libmarpa library does not detect. Many failures are impossible or impractical for a C library to detect. Two examples of failure that the Libmarpa methods do not detect are writes outside the bounds of allocated memory, and use of memory after it has been freed. C is not strongly typed, and arguments of Libmarpa routines undergo only a few simple tests, tests which are inadequate to detect many of the potential problems.

By undetected failure we emphasize that we mean failures undetected by the Libmarpa methods. In the examples just given, there exist tools that can help the programmer detect memory errors and other tools exist to check the sanity of method arguments.

This document points out some of the potentially undetected problems, when doing so seems more helpful than tedious. But any attempt to list all the undetected problems would be too large and unwieldy to be useful.

Undetected failure is always irrecoverable. An undetected failure is neither a hard or a soft failure.