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Re: C constant expressions proposals
"Joseph S. Myers" <jsm@polyomino.org.uk> writes:
> Further comments on any aspects welcome. Given the past heated
> debates on the validity of gcc.c-torture/compile/20010327-1.c I'm a
> bit surprised at the lack of any comments on its reinvalidation (or
> more generally on the choice of extensions for GNU C; given past
> strongly stated opinions on such extensions both to constant
> expressions and elsewhere I'd have expected some people to object
> that there were too many useless extensions included and others (or
> indeed the same people) that important extensions used by real code
> were omitted).
I think there are a lot of people whose eyes glaze over at formal
models, and therefore skipped or skimmed the meat of your proposal.
Me included, to be frank.
I also don't think this category of bugs ("fine details of what is or
is not valid C") is worth spending much time or effort on, compared to
the giant pile of wrong-code-generation, ICE, and poor-optimization
bugs that are out there.
Since you specifically ask about 20010327-1.c, I think it looks
awfully like the sort of code that people write down in the guts of an
operating system, and I think we have broken those people's code a lot
and maybe we should think about cutting them some slack.
zw