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- Newsgroups: comp.std.c
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!cs.utexas.edu!torn!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!watmath!thinkage!dat
- From: dat@thinkage.on.ca (David Adrien Tanguay)
- Subject: struct hack, was Re: strcpy implementation question
- Message-ID: <1992Sep4.015335.3612@thinkage.on.ca>
- Organization: Thinkage, Ltd.
- References: <9209030426.AA24169@enet-gw.pa.dec.com>
- Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 01:53:35 GMT
- Lines: 20
-
- diamond@jit081.enet.dec.com (03-Sep-1992 1325) writes:
- >In article <PINKAS.92Sep2173635@skywalker.intel.com> pinkas@skywalker.intel.com (Israel Pinkas) writes:
- >>The variable length struct is a hack. There is nothing in the language
- >>that prevents the compiler from performing bounds checking on accesses to
- >>name.
- >
- >Uh, nothing except the standard's definitions of [], unary *, and binary +
- >operators. :-R rhetoric.
- >Bounds checking is not allowed to affect output of a valid but ugly program.
-
- Could you flesh this argument out? I had the impression that the last time
- it came up here the conclusion was that this trick was not sanctioned
- (i.e., a bounds checker could fail). After all, 3.3.6 "Additive Operators"
- says that you aren't guaranteed to go past the end of an array object,
- so if you start with the trailing array (in the struct) you can't go past
- its end. (You could if you used a different "handle" for the malloc return
- value.)
- --
- David Tanguay dat@Thinkage.on.ca dat@Thinkage.com uunet!thinkage!dat
- Thinkage, Ltd. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada [43.40N 80.47W]
-