Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!tbrakitz
From: tbrakitz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Triantaphyllos Byron Rakitzis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Zero Length Arrays Allowed in C Standard?
Message-ID: <11963@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 89 19:52:09 GMT
References: <2298@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <11715@smoke.BRL.MIL> <480@codonics.COM> <1989Dec2.210042.12668@twwells.com> <8129@cg-atla.UUCP> <1989Dec5.112553.24087@twwells.com>
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: bill@twwells.com's message of 5 Dec 89 11:25:53 GMT

Bill Wells says:

>This still can waste memory, because of padding in the size of
>SYMTAB. Moreover, some systems might take that [1] declaration
>seriously and give you an error when you access something beyond
>the first element of the string. The kind that immediately comes
>to mind is debugging interpreters: these, one hopes, will check
>for accessing outside the bounds of an array.

Wait, hold on a second. If an implementation of C does bounds checking
then it isn't C any more. That's not how C works. There's no such
thing as an array in C. Just pointers, and memory. It's up to the 
system to do segementation protection, if it wants. 

Byron Rakitzis

(Honestly, I don't see any problem with declaring an array [1] and
then subtracting one from the malloc() call.  Really, what's the
problem? How can this be a waste of memory? You never have a zero-byte
string! C strings are always terminated with a '\0' anyway!!)


-- 
"C Code."
	  "C Code run."
			"Run, Code, run!"
Byron Rakitzis. (tbrakitz@phoenix.princeton.edu ---- tbrakitz@pucc.bitnet)