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

[Mike Stump]

On Tuesday, August 24, 2004, at 03:31  PM, Joe Buck wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 02:58:33PM -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>> The people who write testsuites for a living think a lot about corner
>> cases and try to write tests that cause compilers to get the corner
>> cases wrong.  They go through the standard line-by-line, thinking of
>> pathological things.  None of them have ever written the test that 
>> David
>> is suggesting.
>
> But the suggested test is clearly a non-conforming program, one whose
> behavior is unspecified.

Man, talk about mixing metaphors...

First, non-conforming doesn't exist in C++, that is from the C standard.
Second, the you are thinking about a strictly conforming program:

        [#5] A strictly conforming  program  shall  use  only  those
        features  of  the  language  and  library  specified in this
        International  Standard.2)   It  shall  not  produce  output
        dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or  implementation-
        defined   behavior,   and   shall  not  exceed  any  minimum
        implementation limit.

a conforming program is different:

        [#7]  A  conforming  program  is one that is acceptable to a
        conforming implementation.4)

Because the program is accepted, it is a conforming program, because it 
is conforming, it cannot be non-conforming.