Ackermann's Function

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <4034 at aw.sei.cmu.edu> firth at sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes:
>The proper C translation is: ...

Actually, I liked John Gilmore's better!

>Arguing about a side effect that shouldn't even be there is a pretty
>pointless exercise, so I won't.

The issue is not tied to Ackermann's function, but is a more general
question about order of evaluation.  (My guess, since I don't have
the draft proposed standard at hand, is that Stallman is right --
it is not until the inner A() is evaluated that issues of interleaving
of ITS arguments are relevant; whether or not the outer A()'s other
argument is evaluated before or after this is implementation-dependent.
I do recall that the wording about sequence points changed somewhat
since the old draft, so it may be clearer in the current one.)