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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!caip!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!colin
From: colin@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Colin Kelley)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: enum function bug?
Message-ID: <365@vu-vlsi.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Sep-86 13:04:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: vu-vlsi.365
Posted: Tue Sep 23 13:04:06 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Sep-86 23:05:05 EDT
References: <103@hcx1.UUCP>
Reply-To: colin@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Colin Kelley)
Organization: Villanova Univ. EE Dept.
Lines: 35

In article <103@hcx1.UUCP> notes@hcx1.UUCP writes:
>
>struct st { int c ; } ; 
>int func (b);
>   int b; 
>{
>}
>main()
>{
>   struct st s;
>   func (&s);
>}
This is obviously wrong, since ints are not pointers!  But what I thought
you were going to try was

main()
{
	struct st s;
	func (s);
}

That is, call func() passing it the whole structure as if it were an int,
since we all _know_ the structure just consists of one int anyway, right!
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS!!!  Of course it won't get by lint, but quite a few
programmers wind up doing it because it works on so many machines.  Well,
it doesn't work at all on a Pyramid, where structures are passed differently
than ints.

Someone here got bitten by this attempting to port smp (a symbolic math
package) to our Pyramid.  The bozo programmer had declared a union containing
all possible pointers, but then declared the formal parameter just as a pointer
to an int.  "What", you say, "commercial code which doesn't even pass lint?"
That's what I said too!  Yuck...

			-Colin Kelley ..{cbmvax,pyrnj,psuvax1}!vu-vlsi!colin