Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: ORCA/C Bugs.. or FEATURES?!
Message-ID: <11359@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 20 Oct 89 15:26:15 GMT
References: <8910190700.AA14944@trout.nosc.mil>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 25

In article <8910190700.AA14944@trout.nosc.mil> sysop@pro-generic.cts.com (Matthew Montano) writes:
>  I found an interesting bug in ORCA/C's compiler today:
>  Try placing a return on a line by itself without the terminating ";" for the
>line. If the following line is a simple assignment operator (x=10 etc.) then
>it will compile and work correctly without the ";", with a flow control
>operator after it (while, for etc.) it will error out on the compile.

I recently reviewed the archived messages about ORCA/C on Genie,
and was quite disappointed to find most of them in this vein --
in other words, somebody not knowing how to use C.  In fact ORCA/C
is doing the right thing here.  That's not to say it doesn't have
bugs, but unfortunately most of what Mike Westerfield seems to have
been tracking down are user misunderstandings about C, not actual
bugs.

>...  No matter what I try, it crashes into the monitor on the return
>in all occurences under finddevice.

ORCA/C, due to its function linkage design, is quite unforgiving when
you misuse functions (i.e. have parameter/argument type mismatches or
other conformability errors).  I don't know for sure what is causing
the particular problem you reported, but keep that in mind.

For example, possibly ORCA/C is not happy that you failed to return a
value in your int-valued function finddevice().