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Nope. C is on the stack not on the heap => No initialisation before use. Can you elaborate a little Edgar. In Oberon there are RECORDS (Aka structs in C). If a you have a RECORD variable in a procedure space is allocated on the stack and you can at once work with it. You will never get a Trap -14 with a RECORD variable. (Like the 'C' message record Chris wondered about) OTOH there are POINTER variables which can point to NIL (Nothing) To be able to work with them you either have to assign another POINTER variable to them or you have to allocate memory for them with NEW(<pointer variable>). And if you are in very bad luck the space on your heap is already used up, the garbage collector also doesn't help. So you get probably your variable back

Edgar wrote: pointing at NIL. And when you try to access it BANG: Trap -14 ! I hope this isn't too detailed. But you asked for it :-)

Cheers, Edgar