Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!tut!tukki!tarvaine
From: tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: ambiguous ?
Message-ID: <1728@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 21 Oct 89 08:00:31 GMT
References: <1989Oct19.022327.6730@utzoo.uucp> <14092@lanl.gov> <6611@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 16

In article <6611@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>  a reliable evaluation order
...
> the only time this matters is when your function
>arguments have a side effect; when this occurs in more than one argument; and
>when the side effect interact.

Another situation where order of evaluation matters (and in my -
admittedly limited - experience, a more common one, as well as harder
to circumvent when it really matters) is when intermediate overflows
or rounding errors are possible, especially with floating point
numbers.  (Ever tried to implement extended precision floating point
arithmetic with Dekker formulas or some such?)
-- 
Tapani Tarvainen    (tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi, tarvainen@finjyu.bitnet)