from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
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 {address
space}), 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-time
system} and the operating system.
See also: {fatal error}.
(1997-08-03)