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Re: [PATCH] Document arithmetic overflow semantics


Robert Dewar wrote:

Yes, and that intuition is dangerously misleading, because it gives a false
sense of comfort. If I tell you that an uninitialized variable could cause
the system disk to be deleted, you will tend to react "yeah, yeah, we know
this language lawyer stuff, but in practice, no implementor is going to
do something that silly". However, once you allow an optimizer to back
propagate the assumption that a program has a defined behavior, things
may get surprising, and as you can see from my earlier message, there is
a not too far fetched scenario in which a well meaning implementation could
in fact end up deleting the system disk unintentionally as an indirect
consequence of an uninitialized variable.
Yes, but won't such a program always give a compile-time
warning like "this branch will never be executed" or
"unreachable code deleted"?  Can you give an example
where the compiler will delete a branch but where it
is not able to diagnose it did?


Segher



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