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From: mat@mtx5a.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Re: Incrementing after a cast
Message-ID: <1724@mtx5a.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Jan-87 13:29:57 EST
Article-I.D.: mtx5a.1724
Posted: Tue Jan 13 13:29:57 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Jan-87 19:53:02 EST
References: <2029@brl-adm.ARPA> <5480@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Middletown, NJ 07748-4801.
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> >Casts are conversions? Oh? You'd never know it looking at the code that
> >out of my C compilers ... including Harbison's!  He just regards away.
> 
> The sender's name and some of his text must have been processed by
> software written according to his notions of type casts!
> 
> >... Why lots of people with ordinary machines can't do something 
> >useful, intuitive, and natural because some solder-crazed EE somewhere might,
> >just might mind you, someday do something unnatural to his memory system is 
> >beyond me.  
> 
> Funny, I never considered Dennis Ritchie a "solder-crazed EE".
> He explained to this list not long ago that type casts definitely
> are conversions, done "as if" via assignment to unnamed temporary
> variables.  I don't know why this is so hard for some people to
> understand, unless perhaps there are instructors out there who
> are teaching falsehoods.

What gets generated on a given machine for a given input is of only marginal
relevance to the general case.  It is always sufficient for the compiler to
produce code which is equivalent to the ``correct'' code in every way that
matters in the given situation; if in that situation, the effect of a cast can
be produced with a null code sequence, it's fine for the compiler to do that
*in that circumstance*.
-- 

	from Mole End			Mark Terribile
		(scrape .. dig )	mtx5b!mat
					(Please mail to mtx5b!mat, NOT mtx5a!
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