What's a C expert?

[Charlie Geyer]

In article <25999 at amdcad.AMD.COM> tim at amd.com (Tim Olson) writes:

> Having the sign of chars be undefined allows the implementation to be as
> efficient as possible with respect to converting between chars and ints.

In article <4724 at alvin.mcnc.org> spl at mcnc.org.UUCP (Steve Lamont) replies:

> Huh?  Are you telling us that the standard *allows* such a horrible
> thing?  Aaaaaaarrrrrgh!  :-+ (<-- smiley sucking on a persimmon)  I
> thought the standard was supposed to clarify things, not confuse the
> issue.  It's almost like saying that a declaration of int may be either
> signed or unsigned.  Makes for somewhat unpredictable behavior and/or
> some fairly verbose defensive coding...

C is "hardware friendly."

The standard has been written by some very clever people to allow C to
be implemented as efficiently as possible on almost any hardware no
matter how brain damaged.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.