Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!diku!ambush!kimcm
From: kimcm@ambush.UUCP (Kim Chr. Madsen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Re: A bad design decision early on in ANSI C.
Message-ID: <572@ambush.UUCP>
Date: 29 Dec 87 09:21:21 GMT
Organization: AmbraSoft A/S (Denmark)
Lines: 21

pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel) writes:
>[Structure assignment passing]

>I vote for keeping it.  I have had to suffer through a C compiler that
>didn't do this when I *wanted* to pass whole structures on the stack.

>There are also a number of compilers (such as B*rkeley Pascal) that pass
>"by value" arguments by value.  To maintain compatability with them it is
>necessary to have some mechanism for pushing blocks of things on the stack
>in the function call list.

It can't be the objective of C (whether ANSI or not) to be compatible
with other programming languages or their compilers. Although I agree
that it is a nice feature - but dangerous on some systems:

	1) Forget the & when passing a pointer blows your program.
	2) Passing of huge structures may bomb the stack on small systems.


					Happy New Year
					Kim Chr. Madsen.