Abort in low memory situations

[Shawn T . Amundson]

A C++ program compiled with egcs aborts or gets a segmentation
fault when it can no longer allocate memory instead of properly 
throwing the exception.  Here is my test case (foo.ii):

# 1 "foo.cc"

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  try {
    while (new char) 
      ;
  }
  catch (...) {
    return 23;
  }

  return 0;
}


I compiled this using:

g++ --save-temps -o foo foo.cc

The output is usually:

% ./foo
Abort

When I change the "new char" to "new char[2048]", I occasionally
get a segmentation fault instead of an abort.  Sometimes it works
as I expect for large memory allocations, I assume because enough
memory is left for the program to throw the exception.

The system is a fairly up-to-date Debian system:

amundson@ariadne % uname -a
Linux ariadne 2.2.5 #2 SMP Fri Apr 9 12:17:19 CDT 1999 i686 unknown
amundson@ariadne % as --version
GNU assembler 2.9.1
amundson@ariadne % g++ --version
egcs-2.91.63
amundson@ariadne % ldd foo
        /lib/nfslock.so.0 => /lib/nfslock.so.0 (0x40016000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x4001f000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
amundson@ariadne % ls -l /lib/libc.so.6
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           13 Apr  7 20:10 /lib/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.1.1.so*

Thanks for any help,

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson               
amundson@gimp.org               http://www.gimp.org/~amundson

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking