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From: mccaugh@uiucdcsm.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: short circuit evaluation (44 li
Message-ID: <4700004@uiucdcsm>
Date: Sat, 21-Feb-87 00:41:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsm.4700004
Posted: Sat Feb 21 00:41:00 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Feb-87 02:27:45 EST
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Nf-From: uiucdcsm.cs.uiuc.edu!mccaugh    Feb 20 23:41:00 1987


 This is not submitted as a criticism to the foregoing erudite discussion of
 side-effects, but is rather an innocent question about C in particular: why
 does C refuse to abide by the associativity/precedence rules for expression-
 evaluation that even BASIC guarantees? I can well understand "optimization"
 as an excuse but can easily imagine cases where normally-evaluated expressions
 can crash a system when "optimized" for eavaluation without the programmer's
 express consent. Isn't it a little arbitrary for C to mnaipulate the parts
 of an expression to its satisfaction (or whim)? In particular, this renders
 the formal verification of C-code impractical.