Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Address of Arrays
Message-ID: <1994@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 16 Dec 87 23:04:33 GMT
References: <15869@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 19

In article <15869@watmath.waterloo.edu> rbutterworth@watmath.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) writes:
>Anyway, one thing I like about this ability in modern versions of C
>is for passing arguments to a function [which can then be typechecked].

I'm glad someone mentioned this.  One good example is setjmp(), which really
ought to take the address of a jmp_buf (rather than the value) as argument.

>But since prototypes are new and so don't affect existing code, they should
>at least have either
>1) allowed prototypes of the form x[n] to be actual arrays
>2) disallowed prototypes of the form x[] or x[n], so that future
>   versions of the language could allow (1) without breaking anything.

Exactly what Mark Brader and I have been saying.  Unfortunately, I think the
good people at X3J11 have determined (probably correctly) that (1) is too much
work at this point, and have overlooked the benefits of (2).  (Or, more
precisely, overlooked the costs of not doing (2).)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint