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From: casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: stupid C question
Message-ID: <16124@lll-winken.UUCP>
Date: 31 Dec 88 20:38:02 GMT
References: <8812300028.AA17754@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU> <4543@xenna.Encore.COM>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.UUCP
Reply-To: casey@lll-crg.llnl.gov.UUCP (Casey Leedom)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 26

| From: bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein)
| 
| What's worse are compilers (known to exist!) which return sizeof(char *)
| for sizeof(string constant), that is unacceptable but worth a moment's
| thought when relying on these semantics or trying to track down a problem.

  Unacceptable in the sense that all C compilers that I know of return
n+1 instead of sizeof(char *) giving us a ``common law'' standard, but
the second interpretation is just as consistent as the first if not more
so.  K&R allows us to do both of the following:

1.	char s[] = "...";
2.	char *t  = "...";

  Is "..." really just shorthand for ``{ '.', '.', '.' }'', or is it a
directive to the compiler to find some space somewhere (n+1 in size) and
then replace the reference to the double quoted object with a char *
pointer to that space?

  Throughout C, there are in fact more instances of the second than there
are of the first.  I can pass "..." as an argument to a function and get
the second interpretation, but not the first for instance.  In some ways
interpreting sizeof("...") to be sizeof(char *) would be more consistent,
but certainly less useful.

Casey