<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.
