short circuit evaluation (44 li

[mccaugh at uiucdcsm.UUCP]

 This is not submitted as a criticism to the foregoing erudite discussion of
 side-effects, but is rather an innocent question about C in particular: why
 does C refuse to abide by the associativity/precedence rules for expression-
 evaluation that even BASIC guarantees? I can well understand "optimization"
 as an excuse but can easily imagine cases where normally-evaluated expressions
 can crash a system when "optimized" for eavaluation without the programmer's
 express consent. Isn't it a little arbitrary for C to mnaipulate the parts
 of an expression to its satisfaction (or whim)? In particular, this renders
 the formal verification of C-code impractical.