Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!apple!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Can the address of a variable change during a function?
Message-ID: <2668@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 21 Nov 88 17:24:15 GMT
References: <6472@june.cs.washington.edu> <8938@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 26

In article <8938@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>>In this case, the behavior of the program will be *very*
>>different than if the variables had been declared with
>>	    auto int i;
>>	    int j;
>
>No, the "auto" was implicit in the previous example.  In fact there
>is no real use for an explicit "auto" keyword in C.

Well, I have found one use: bringing code up under buggy C compilers.
Some earlier versions of the Masscomp C compiler choke and die when
handed large programs with lots of "register" variables.  I almost
always got them to come up by specifying

	-Dregister=auto

Some people attempt

	-Dregister=

in such cases, but this often leads to invalid C.

-- 
- Joe Buck
	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, or uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck,
	or jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net for old Arpa sites