Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Question about type casting
Message-ID: <7119@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 18 Jan 88 01:24:30 GMT
References: <546@xyzzy.UUCP> <5080011@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 19

In article <5080011@hpfcdc.HP.COM> boemker@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Tim Boemker) writes:
>2. Whenever an array identifier appears in an expression, it is treated as
>   being a pointer to the first element of the array.

I can think of two exceptions to this: when the array name is the operand of
sizeof or the operand of &.

>   Casting an expression
>   as an array is just asking that expression to be used as a pointer to the
>   base element of a (mutli-dimensional) rectangular collection of elements.

How do you figure that?  A cast operator is supposed to accomplish a virtual
assignment of the operand into an object of the specified type, an array in
this case, and we should all know that C does not support assignment into an
array.

>   Saying that the resulting expression would
>   have to be a temporary array does not make sense under K&R, ...

Excuse me, but saying anything else does not make sense.