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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Expressions in initializers
Message-ID: <15403@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 10 Mar 91 18:36:15 GMT
References: <760@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <1991Mar4.144939.8311@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <17294@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <17294@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> volpe@camelback.crd.ge.com (Christopher R Volpe) writes:
>"The square root of two" can be evaluated at compile time, but "sqrt(2.0)"
>is an invocation of a function. How is the compiler supposed to know
>what sqrt is?

In a conforming hosted implementation, the external identifier "sqrt" is
reserved for the standard sqrt() function, and an implementation is
entitled to exploit that fact to, for example, substitute in-line code
that accesses floating-point hardware directly, rather than actually
perform a full C function call.