Re: Help with bit-field semantics in C and C++

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 12:26:24PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>   It seems to me that "unspecified" and "undefined" are repeatedly being
> confused in this discussion.  They are both clearly defined technical terms
> in the standard; they have different meanings; everyone participating in
> this thread should make very sure they know which one they're referring to
> at any time.
> 
>   "undefined" is the one that covers rm -rf'ing your hard drive.
> 
>   "unspecified" is what the standard says that the result of the truncating
> cast we've been discussing is.  That means (IIUIC) that the result has to be
> one of the enumeration values, but that the standard does not specify which
> _particular_ one.

If you are correct, then it appears that every C++ compiler I know of gets
this wrong.  That is, it seems that every C++ compiler happily allows
out-of-range integers to be assigned to enums, and does so in a way that
the effect is observable.

If your interpretation is correct, then I can write the following test for
a conforming compiler; g++ fails this test.  I'm deliberately putting
is_zero and is_one in separate functions, to catch a compiler that might
allow storing the 3, but that would later assume that global must be zero
or one and optimize the "if" away.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
extern "C" void abort();

enum E { zero, one };

E global;

void assign_global(int arg) {
    global = (E)arg;
}

bool is_zero() {
     return global == zero;
}

bool is_one() {
     return global == one;
}

int main(int,char**) {
    assign_global(3);
    if (!is_zero() && !is_one())
        abort();
}