
96 ◾ Software Essentials
Memory requests may fail and obviously will do so when the amount of
memory requested exceeds that available. When the amount of memory
requested is available but is not contiguously located, that is, when there
is no one block big enough to satisfy the request, a memory request will
also fail. is state of memory is called fragmented memory. Consider a
request to allocate an array of 500 reals (double variable type). If a dou-
ble is of size 8 bytes, 4000 bytes are needed. If 30,000 bytes are available
but all blocks are of size 3200 or smaller, the memory request will fail.
To indicate an unsatised memory request, ...