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From: desj@idacrd.UUCP (David desJardins)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: ambiguous ?
Message-ID: <483@idacrd.UUCP>
Date: 23 Oct 89 21:18:15 GMT
References: <11388@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Organization: idacrd, princeton, nj
Lines: 13

From article <11388@smoke.BRL.MIL>, by gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn):
> The mathematical formalisms to which you allude do not deal with
> side effects, which is the only thing that makes evaluation order
> an issue.

   I don't agree with this.  Efficiency can also be a major issue.  It
makes sense to say that you want one expression evaluated first if you
expect that the second one is more expensive to evaluate and/or less
likely to be needed.  (This is obviously something that an optimizer
may not be able to determine.)  This feature is one of the annoying
things which FORTRAN is missing.

   -- David desJardins