'C' style etc...

[David Collier-Brown]

| In article <8449 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, doug at eris.UUCP writes:
||			case 'REXX':
|  This is bad style...it is not guaranteed to work, according to K&R, and
|  certainly does *not* work with many C compilers.

In article <1813 at sugar.UUCP> peter at sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
| Whadda you know. Every compiler I've hit with this so far has worked just
| fine. I just assumed that it was in K&R. After all, it makes perfect sense,
| modulo byte ordering problems, so by the principle of least astonishment
| it should be there.

  Well, it works IFF you have 4-byte words, or a good promotion
mechanism to make 'REXX' turn into a long automagically (some do).
  It truncates on many 16-bit machines... including one old
pdp-11 I remember fondly.

  If you want something humorous, try using case `REXX` (notice the
quotes) on a machine using an old copy of PCC: It tries to generate
BCD for a GCOS 3 machine.

--dave (prior art, yes. yucko, though) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.                 {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
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