Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pdn!boake2!jc3b21!crash
From: crash@jc3b21.UUCP (Frank J. Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: Galactic Bloodshed compiler error
Message-ID: <667@jc3b21.UUCP>
Date: 12 May 89 16:54:05 GMT
References: <104342@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Followup-To: comp.lang.c
Organization: St. Petersburg Jr. College, FL
Lines: 38

From article <104342@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, by kcr%rushforth@Sun.COM (Kevin Rushforth):
: In article <808@jura.tcom.stc.co.uk> pjb@htc2.UUCP (Peter J. Bishop) writes:
:>the only solution that I could come up with to solve it was to change the
:>lines of the form:
:>
:>	p->popn *= .80;
:>
:>and change them to read:
:>
:>	p->popn = p->popn * .80;
:>
:>Hope this solves your problem.
:>BTW Does anyone know why this solves the problem? Or have I made a mistake in
:>the modification?
: 
: If this does indeed solve the problem, then your compiler is broken.
: 
: If "a" is an lvalue and "b" is an expression, then:
: 
: 	a *= b;
: 
: is identical to:
: 
: 	a = a * (b);
: 
: except for the fact that "a" is evaluated (e.g. for side effects) only once.

Actually, I used a compiler once in which the "broken" code was the
expression parser, i.e. "a *= .80" didn't work but "a *= (.80)" or
"a *= 0.80" did!!

Some sort of problem with the floating point number starting with a
period immediately after an assignment token, et al.

Followups to comp.lang.c :-)

Frank "Crash" Edwards
...!uunet!pdn!jc3b21!crash