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From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: cast changes meaning of auto-increment?
Keywords: cast, ++
Message-ID: <13537@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 88 19:33:24 GMT
References: <901@mina.liu.se>
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 99

In article <901@mina.liu.se> mikpe@mina.liu.se (Mikael Pettersson) writes:
>Consider the following piece of code:
>--begin-example--
>{
>	int i = 27;
>	register char *cp, *oldcp;
>
>	oldcp = cp = (char *)&i;
>	printf("i == %d, ", *(int *)cp++);		/* should print `27' */
>	printf("and cp increased by %d\n", cp-oldcp);	/* 4 or 1 ? */
>}
>--end-of-example--
>My question is: what should be printed by the second printf, 4 or 1?

The answer is 1; but:

>Many PCC-based m68k compilers (including SUN's) print `4' but I know of at
>least two (GCC on our SUNs and GOULD's UTX/32 compiler) that insist on
>printing `1'.

Any compiler that does this is buggy.  It is not even a question of
whether one can increment the result of a cast (many PCC compilers
allow this).

>Since a cast doesn't produce an lvalue, I assume the ++ should be applied
>to `cp' after the int was fetched (i.e., cp should increase by 1) ....

All you need do to answer this particular question is to look at the
operator precedence.  `++' operates before `cast'.  The expression
`i = *(int *)cp++' must thus be evaluated in the (virtual) order:

	cp		(lvalue, type `char *', value &i)
	postfix-++	(rvalue, type `char *', value &i)
			[side effect: last lvalue (cp) += sizeof(char)]
	(int *)		(rvalue, type `int *', value &i)
	*		(lvalue, type `int', value i)

The only way the bug would make any sense at all (other than as a
clear bug) would be if the expression were written

	i = *((int *)cp)++);

to force the order to

	cp		(lvalue, type `char *', value &i)
	(int *)		(rvalue, type `int *', value &i)
	postfix-++	(error, rvalue, type `int *', value &i)
			[side effect: last lvalue (none) += sizeof(int)]
	*		(rvalue, type `int', value i)

which is (as Mike notes above) illegal, but if the compiler forgets
to change `l' to `r' value after the cast would produce what Sun's PCC
does.

Note that the SunOS compilers that get

	*(int *)cp++

wrong get

	*(int *)++cp

right.  Also, if we run the compiler with debugging on, we can
even see that the problem is in the code generator, which is simply
overly liberal with its reg@+ addressing modes:

	f(){
		register char *cp;
		register int *ip, i;
		i = *(int *)cp++;
		i = *(int *)ip++;
	}
	(/lib/ccom -Xe)

	0x509d0) =, int, 17, 4
	    0x50850) REG, 0x0, 7, int, 17, 4
	    0x509b0) U*, int, 17, 4
		0x50910) ++, PTR int, 17, 4
		    0x508d0) REG, 0x0, 13, PTR char, 17, 2
		    0x508f0) ICON, 0x1, 16384, int, 0, 4
		movl	a5@+,d7

Note that a5 was supposed to be incremented by 1 (the value
of the ICON at 0x508f0), not 4.

	0x50b50) =, int, 17, 4
	    0x509f0) REG, 0x0, 7, int, 17, 4
	    0x50b30) U*, int, 17, 4
		0x50ab0) ++, PTR int, 17, 4
		    0x50a70) REG, 0x0, 12, PTR int, 17, 4
		    0x50a90) ICON, 0x4, 16384, int, 0, 4
		movl	a4@+,d7

This time, a4 was supposed to be incremented by 4 (and was).
(If I had compiler sources, I could probably even provide a fix,
but Sun will not sell those.)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris@mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris