Bug in C compiler (?)

Tony Luck aegl at edee.UUCP
Fri Feb 17 22:17:56 AEST 1984


[Please do not eat this line]
We've just started porting emacs on our GEC 63/30 and came across the following
curiosity - just in case you're not entirely fed up with people complaining
about oddities in C syntax that should never come to light if people used a
few more brackets in expressions I thought I'd post it to the net for you to
ignore/flame about/whatever.

There is a macro:
    #define dsputc(c) (--DSskip<0 && --left>=0 ? *cursor++ = c : 0)

This causes complaints from the GEC compiler every time it is used - but
the VAX 4.1 compiler (and presumably the SYS III compiler for which this
version of emacs was purchased) do not object. K&R says that the assignment
operators have lower precedence than "?:" so it looks as though brackets
are required around the "*cursor++ = c" expression and that the 4.1 bsd
compiler is wrong to accept this. [I also added brackets around the 'c'
so that calling the macro with an expression as argument wouldn't muck
things up too much].

Tony (let's have more brackets) Luck         { ... UK!ukc!edcaad!edee!aegl}



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