Zero Length Arrays Allowed in C Standard?

[Triantaphyllos Byron Rakitzis]

Bill Wells says:

>This still can waste memory, because of padding in the size of
>SYMTAB. Moreover, some systems might take that [1] declaration
>seriously and give you an error when you access something beyond
>the first element of the string. The kind that immediately comes
>to mind is debugging interpreters: these, one hopes, will check
>for accessing outside the bounds of an array.

Wait, hold on a second. If an implementation of C does bounds checking
then it isn't C any more. That's not how C works. There's no such
thing as an array in C. Just pointers, and memory. It's up to the 
system to do segementation protection, if it wants. 

Byron Rakitzis

(Honestly, I don't see any problem with declaring an array [1] and
then subtracting one from the malloc() call.  Really, what's the
problem? How can this be a waste of memory? You never have a zero-byte
string! C strings are always terminated with a '\0' anyway!!)


-- 
"C Code."
	  "C Code run."
			"Run, Code, run!"
Byron Rakitzis. (tbrakitz at phoenix.princeton.edu ---- tbrakitz at pucc.bitnet)