Re: GCC 3.4 Heads-up

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Actually, those language extensions (while documented for a long time) are 
> pretty ugly. 
> 
> Some of that ugliness turns into literal bugs when C++ is used.
> 
> The cast/conditional expression as lvalue are _particularly_ ugly 
> extensions, since there is absolutely zero point to them. They are very 
> much against what C is all about, and writing something like this:
> 
> 	a ? b : c = d;
> 
> is something that only a high-level language person could have come up 
> with. The _real_ way to do this in C is to just do
> 
> 	*(a ? &b : &c) = d;
> 
> which is portable C, does the same thing, and has no strange semantics.

I would probably write
   ( a ? b : c ) = d;
instead, having learned C when some compilers parsed ? wrong without 
parens. Actually I can't imagine writing that at all, but at least with 
parens humans can read it easily. Ugly code.

Your suggestion is not portable, if b or c are declared "register" there 
are compilers which will not allow taking the address, and gcc will give 
you a warning.


-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   CTO TMR Associates, Inc
   Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979