ward

n 1: a person who is under the protection or in the custody of

another

2: a district into which a city or town is divided for the

purpose of administration and elections

3: a division of a hospital (or a suite of rooms) shared by

patients who need a similar kind of care; "they put her in

a 4-bed ward" [syn: {hospital ward}]

4: a division of a prison (usually consisting of several cells)

[syn: {cellblock}]

v : watch over or shield from danger or harm; protect; "guard my

possessions while I'm away" [syn: {guard}]

aard

(Dutch for "earth") A tool to check memory

use for {C::} programs, written by Steve Reiss

(who names his programs after living

systems).

Aard tracks the state of each byte of memory in the {heap} and

the {stack}. The state can be one of Undefined,

Uninitialised, Free or Set. The program can detect invalid

transitions (i.e. attempting to set or use undefined or free

storage or attempting to access uninitialised storage).

In addition, the program keeps track of heap use through

{malloc} and {free} and at the end of the run reports memory

blocks that were not freed and that are not accessible

(i.e. {memory leaks}).

The tools works using a spliced-in {shared library} on

{SPARCs} running {C::} 3.0.1 under {SunOS} 4.X.

{(ftp://wilma.cs.brown.edu/pub/aard.tar.Z)}.

(1998-03-03)