Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: When is a cast not a cast?
Message-ID: <2919@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 19 May 89 18:31:33 GMT
References: <2747@buengc.BU.EDU> <10191@smoke.BRL.MIL> <406@skye.ed.ac.uk> <10276@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2890@buengc.BU.EDU> <10282@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2051@unisoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.lang.c
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 59

In article <2051@unisoft.UUCP> hamish@unisoft.UUCP (Hamish Reid) writes:
>Blair, you still haven't answered the question.

What question?  Okay, I got one for you:  what is the meaning of life?
Define it semantically.  Screw formalism.  Just give me a ballpark
estimate.  If it's not on my desk in the morning, life
must cease to exist.  And seriously (:-)), why would you want such
a thing to exist?  It would only screw up this nice mix of methane
gases and the arrangement of volcanic rocks we have on this planet...

>Dangerous Analogy, again - it makes some sort of sense to add (say) "8"
>(units unspecified but generally understood) to 2052 McGee; in some
>reasonably-well understood intuitive sense it probably means something
>like move 8 apartments (note type and implicit scaling here) to the
>south down McGee, and read the address - "2060 McGee" (actually, the
>wrong answer - it's not the same block - but we can allow for that if
>we know the particular implementation...).  This is *not* the same as
>adding two actual addresses.

And if you want to lob a terrorist grenade into a block of flats?  Are
you going to cobble up the average by doing all that address-integer-
address conversion one apartment at a time?  Or are you going to sum a
column of numbers, divide by the count, and throw a high, hard one at
the one nearest the result?

>Blair, a constructive challenge:

>Post, to this newsgroup, a formal semantics definition of some proposed

For a semanticist or a professional computer scientist (of which I doubt
many have the time to be wasting on this sort of thing... :) maybe, neither
of which I am.  I'm just a C-coding hacknut with a yen to see two pointers
added together.  It's not going to form a final result, surely, except
maybe for some bizarre statistical procedure or some method of
characterizing an unknown system by its transformant signature, but it is
there to allow such things as quick access to the centroid of whatever
memory map exists, among no doubt countless other uses.  Shit.  You tell
me that fifteen years ago you thought pointers were worth the extra *.

I merely came up with an idea.  It's up to the professionals to come up
with reasons that it is viable.  Just saying 'no, it's not' isn't going
to convince me that you've tried.  Everything has its pros, no matter
the cons.

Barring that, I'd do with an explanation of the decision to nonimplement
it from those who made the decision, not a load of folk-etymological
crapola from a load of casual rom-bats.  They do put 'rationale' in with
standards, you know.

>Until we see this formal semantics, many of us will remain convinced
>that you still do not have a totally clear grasp of pointers - or C for

Not relevant.  Until I see your answer to the meaning of life, in
triplicate, all of us will remain convinced that you lack a sense of
proportion.

				--Blair
				  "Lemme give you a hint:
				   it's NOT binary code..."