Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!gatech!prism!loligo!pepke
From: pepke@loligo.cc.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: THINK C Array Design Flaw
Message-ID: <698@loligo.cc.fsu.edu>
Date: 8 May 89 13:40:02 GMT
References: <664@loligo.cc.fsu.edu> <24093@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <696@loligo.cc.fsu.edu>
Reply-To: pepke@loligo.UUCP (Eric Pepke)
Organization: Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
Lines: 26

In article <696@loligo.cc.fsu.edu> I write:
>This is perfectly legal C, and it makes no assumptions on how big the
>array is.  If you have enough memory, a call to Access7(40000, 2) should
>be perfectly reasonable, but it will fail. 

This statement of mine is nonsense, of course.Such a call is only reasonable 
in a C where int is defined as bigger than 16 bits.  When you use Lightspeed
C, as you would have to declare a and b as long integers.  When you do that, 
you get what looks like correct code.  

Also, my statement that Lightspeed C would generate bad code in some cases
where a syntax check would fail is also wrong.  The multiplier for the first
subscript is determined by dimensions 2 through N, and cases where the
multiplier would be greater than 32767 would be rejected first by the
test for arrays with size greater than 32767.

What is will do is reject certain array declarations needlessly, as in the
case of hist[32][32][32];

Eric Pepke                                     ARPA:   pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute  MFENET: pepke@fsu
Florida State University                       SPAN:   pepke@scri
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052                     BITNET: pepke@fsu
 
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