Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: array[-1] -- permitted? Message-ID: <1603@ficc.uu.net> Date: 24 Sep 88 15:06:34 GMT References: <1237@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <816@goofy.megatest.UUCP> Organization: SCADA Lines: 19 In article <816@goofy.megatest.UUCP>, djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) writes: > I missed some of the early postings on this subject. Could someone > be kind enough to bring me up to date? Is the committee going to > break this code? If so, why, fer Pete's sake? No, the comittee isn;t going to break that code. Those array references are from a pointer pointing into the middle of an array back into the earlier part of the array. This is legal. What is not legal is to have a pointer point back before the beginning of an array, even if it is not dereferenced, because there are architectures that do bounds checking on pointer calculations and there are architectures like the intel 8086 family for which this is may not even be meaningful. Personally, I think these architectures are the result of severe brain damage or overdependence on marketing claims. But they're out there, and have to be accomodated. -- Peter da Silva `-_-' Ferranti International Controls Corporation. "Have you hugged U your wolf today?" peter@ficc.uu.net