Question

A user reported an abend right when my program starts up. The stack trace was:

Loc 1:  Classes.Get (3368, 2)
Loc 2:  Behold (58, 18)

I’ve never observed this problem before, and no other user has ever reported this to me, and my user said that so far, this is the only time he’s had this.

Line 18 in my program is simply my Application.Run statement in the .dpr for my program.

Line 3368 in Classes is the Error statement in:

function TList.Get(Index: Integer): Pointer;
begin
  if (Index < 0) or (Index >= FCount) then
    Error(@SListIndexError, Index);
  Result := FList^[Index];
end; 

which indicates some list index was out of bounds. But I cannot tell from this what might have caused it.

My user, who is another programmer, says he thinks this is something called a “printer’s gremlin”.

Does anyone know what a printer’s gremlin is, whether this is something I should be concerned about, and if so, how would I fix this?

Answer 1

The term “Gremlin” can be dated back to World War II, where Gremlins were blamed for problems in mostly technical areas – especially when airplanes crashed without any cause or engines suddenly stopped working (“The’ve put the Gremlins in!”).

For me, the name sounds like a short form for “German Goblin”, but that is only my personal interpretation.

After all, it is nothing you should be concerned of. The actual reason for the error is probably something else.