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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Expressions in initializers
Message-ID: <1991Mar8.004657.20325@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 7 Mar 91 20:09:23 GMT
References: <1075@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> <17270@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <760@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu>
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In article <1075@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann) writes:
>Now, if your machine has a built-in square-root operation, this is still not
>too bad.  But consider the more general case.  We would really want to be able
>to use *any* function available in the standard library.  That means that the
>full standard library must be available for execution at compile time.  It
>should be clear that this is going to make your compiler *a lot* bigger.
>


A testable assumption. On my computer I have three C compilers,
which range in size from 440 kilobytes to 800 kilobytes. Each one comes
with several different floating point libraries, for use with one
of several floating point units (or none at all) and these have sizes
varying from 30 to 45 kilobytes. Some of the compilers have the
libraries already linked in.


So it will NOT make a real modern compiler that much bigger. It might
have an effect if you use the old piece of crap sometimes delivered with certain
operating systems. 


Doug McDonald