Newsgroups: comp.std.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Declarations in switches, errors Message-ID: <1989Sep30.052000.13719@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <561@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <11158@smoke.BRL.MIL> <637@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: Sat, 30 Sep 89 05:20:00 GMT In article <637@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes: >It a feature with limited use even if it did work, but I am bothered by >anything I can write which is legal but may not work the same way on all >implementations... If you want all legal constructs to work the same way in all implementations, you are in the wrong newsgroup! :-) C is *full* of things that are implementation-specific to some degree or other. The usual reason is that most programs don't care about characteristic X, but want the code to run fast, and pinning down characteristic X implies major speed loss on some machines. Actually, very few languages have the property you're after. At the very least, the detailed properties of floating-point arithmetic are almost always implementation-defined. And, as Doug has pointed out, ironically, the behavior of initializers at the head of a case is not an example of this sort of thing. Such initializers *do* *not* get executed in any conforming implementation. -- "Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu