Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!arisia!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Addresses of parameters
Message-ID: <616@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 2 Nov 88 02:50:19 GMT
Article-I.D.: quintus.616
References: <35620@XAIT.Xerox.COM> <10124@haddock.ima.isc.com> <35664@XAIT.Xerox.COM> <29781@think.UUCP> <1013@teorix.liu.se>
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Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <1013@teorix.liu.se> pausv@teorix.liu.se (Paul Svensson) writes:
>Yes, I agree with Barry that taking tha address of a parameter is not
>very useful, but that is NOT a good reason for not allowing it.
>There are other good reasons, such as making it easier to pass arguments
>in registers, for example. ... To allow "&" to work on parameters
>is essentially the same as to allow it to work on register variables,

All the compiler has to do if it sees & applied to an argument is to
spill that argument to memory and use the in-memory version.  Most of
the RISC machines I've looked at adopt a convention where non-scalar
and "excess" arguments are passed in a block on the stack, and gaps are
left for the arguments which are assigned to registers, so each argument-
in-a-register has a slot reserved for it in memory anyway.