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From: pierre@rhi.hi.is (Kjartan Pierre Emilsson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Nasty bug
Message-ID: <2117@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 30 Aug 90 08:52:35 GMT
References: <0093BF08.7F3834E0@rigel.efd.lth.se>
Organization: University of Iceland
Lines: 35

From article <0093BF08.7F3834E0@rigel.efd.lth.se>, by e89hse@rigel.efd.lth.se:
> Hi !
> 
>  I had a lot of trouble with a bug yesterday. The code was similar to the
> following:
> 
> [Code deleted] 
>	prnval(s,f)
>	char *s;
>	float f;
> 
> And it didn't work. Why? The answer is that the parameter f is a
> double, not a float since all floats are converted to double when they are
> passed as arguments to functions.Therefore &f is a ptr to double rather than
> a float.
> 
>  Henrik Sandell

I don't know what other think, but as a relatively experienced C programmer, I
find this bug very counter-intuitive, being used to think that when I declare
some variable in code to be of a given type, I certainly want it to be
of that given type, regardless of what crap I choose to put in it later.
From that point of view, float variables should not be allowed in function
argument declaration.  Personally I never use floats, but this is certainly
a *very* nasty bug.


			-Kjartan
			
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kjartan Pierre Emilsson
Science Institute of the University of Iceland
Dunhaga 3
Reykjavik
ICELAND				e-mail: pierre@krafla.rhi.hi.is