fatal exception

programming, operating system A program execution error

which is trapped by the operating system and which results

in abrupt termination of the program.

It may be possible for the program to catch some such errors,

e.g. a floating point underflow; others, such as an

invalid memory access (an attempt to write to read-only memory

or an attempt to read memory outside of the program's addressspace), may always cause control to pass to the operating

system without allowing the program an opportunity to handle

the error. The details depend on the language's run-timesystem and the operating system.

See also: fatal error.

(1997-08-03)