Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: *THE SPECIAL CASE* (was: function side effects) Message-ID: <3959@lanl.gov> Date: 21 Sep 88 19:14:34 GMT References: <3994@h.cc.purdue.edu> Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory Lines: 22 From article <3994@h.cc.purdue.edu>, by ags@h.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman): > Now, I will ask my question one last time: why is my code example > illegal? > The example you gave appears to be legal. The optimization I gave for your example also appears to be legal. It appears that the semantics of Fortran may be ambiguous in this case. I claim that any case in which the semantics of a programming language are ambiguous is a case which the programmer should regard as illegal. I regard multiple side effects in C expressions as illegal - because the semantics of such things are ambiguous YES!!! I ADMIT IT!!!! You have found a case that I thought was illegal and now it appears to be _merely_ ambiguous in meaning. Now, are you still going to maintain that it should be used by programmers (as you have been doing). Or, do you think it should have the same status as the 'i=f(i++)' type of operation in C? That is, it should be illegal but the committee hasn't said so yet. J. Giles Los Alamos