> RM> Nothing actually wrong with returning ptr after it's been freed,
 > RM> it's just pointless. Unless it's used to return an error if
 > RM> something in the function failed (a bit obfuscated for my taste,
 > RM> unless fully commented...)

 > As i've said in an earlier mssg, it did return the correct string
 > properly, even after it was freed

Don't rely on DOS's braindeadedness (ah! a new word!) too much. If I did
the same under OS/2 or Win32, and dereferenced that freed pointer, I'd get
a nice segmentation violation and the program would halt.

OS/2 is a great environment for debugging things like this.  :-)


 > at one stage i executed a few more
 > functions just to see, how long it'll take until it gets corrupted, got
 > tired of waiting, the string was still in there.

You probably did not allocate any more memory, so the freed block never got
stomped on. Or if you did, it was larger, and/or was allocated out of a
different area of the heap. In any case, it doesn't matter.


 > Of course it's not advisable, and it was basically just a test.

Which only goes to prove that real-mode DOS is real-mode DOS. It
demonstrates nothing at all about C.


Regards,
David

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