Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pilchuck!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: This one bit me today
Message-ID: <2191@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 27 Oct 89 20:23:13 GMT
References: <2651@hub.UUCP> <1651@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <1989Oct23.161744.29153@utzoo.uucp> <928@sdrc.UUCP>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 12

In article <928@sdrc.UUCP> mustard@sdrc.UUCP (Sandy Mustard) writes:
<SAS C on 370 has an option to allow the '@'
<character to indicate that the argument in a function call should be
<passed by reference.  It basically has the same meaning as the '&' but
<the '@' can be used on non-lvalues such as constants and expressions.
<char c;
<     func(&c, @20);
<will cause a pointer to a temporary copy of an int with a value of 20
<to be passed to the function.

Sounds silly to me. Why not just extend the compiler to have &20 mean
just that? The @ is not necessary if such behavior is desired.