Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!ccicpg!cci632!rit!tropix!moscom!ur-valhalla!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!sunybcs!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!rice!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!mica!charlie From: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: What's a C expert? Message-ID: <1528@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu> Date: 22 Jul 89 23:29:58 GMT References: <12214@well.UUCP> <6057@microsoft.UUCP> <4722@alvin.mcnc.org> <25999@amdcad.AMD.COM> <4724@alvin.mcnc.org> Sender: news@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu Reply-To: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) Distribution: all Organization: UW Statistics, Seattle Lines: 22 Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: In article <25999@amdcad.AMD.COM> tim@amd.com (Tim Olson) writes: > Having the sign of chars be undefined allows the implementation to be as > efficient as possible with respect to converting between chars and ints. In article <4724@alvin.mcnc.org> spl@mcnc.org.UUCP (Steve Lamont) replies: > Huh? Are you telling us that the standard *allows* such a horrible > thing? Aaaaaaarrrrrgh! :-+ (<-- smiley sucking on a persimmon) I > thought the standard was supposed to clarify things, not confuse the > issue. It's almost like saying that a declaration of int may be either > signed or unsigned. Makes for somewhat unpredictable behavior and/or > some fairly verbose defensive coding... C is "hardware friendly." The standard has been written by some very clever people to allow C to be implemented as efficiently as possible on almost any hardware no matter how brain damaged. It's not a bug, it's a feature.