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From: steve@umigw.MIAMI.EDU (steve emmerson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: swaps with arrays
Message-ID: <111@umigw.MIAMI.EDU>
Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 09:51:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: umigw.111
Posted: Wed Sep  9 09:51:52 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Sep-87 01:19:12 EDT
References: <2376@zeus.TEK.COM> <110@umigw.MIAMI.EDU> <1955@sol.ARPA>
Reply-To: steve@umigw.UUCP (steve emmerson)
Organization: University of Miami
Lines: 30

In article <1955@sol.ARPA> quiroz@ROCHESTER.UUCP (Cesar Quiroz) writes:
+--------
|what would you like
|                            swap(1, 2);
|to mean?
+--------

I think I'm begining to see what you mean: in C, an array is not
*completely* equivalent to a pointer to its first element because its
value may not be altered.  It is therefore meaningless (i.e. semantic
nonsense) to even *consider* using arrays as arguments to a generic
swap routine since they're constants.  One should pass to a swap
routine only "swappable" objects.

Is this correct?

Although I can see the validity of this argument (and I hope I've
restated it correctly) I would argue that the swapping of arrays does
have valid meaning -- namely an element-by-element exchange of values.
This causes each array to become the other and, to me at least, is a
straightforward consequence of swap semantics.  As such, this
functionality should be included in any generic swap routine.

It appears we may differ in our judgement of swap semantics.

What says the rest of the net?
-- 
Steve Emmerson                     DDN: emmerson@miami.miami.edu
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