What's a C expert?

[Steve Lamont]

In article <25999 at amdcad.AMD.COM> tim at amd.com (Tim Olson) writes:
>In article <4722 at alvin.mcnc.org> spl at mcnc.org.UUCP (Steve Lamont) writes:
>| In article <6057 at microsoft.UUCP> paulc at microsoft.UUCP (Paul Canniff 2/1011) writes:
> [various and sundry bits deleted]
>Chars are not necessarily signed by default.  Many implementations make
>chars unsigned.  This is the reason why the "signed" keyword was added
>to ANSI C.
>
>Having the sign of chars be undefined allows the implementation to be as
>efficient as possible with respect to converting between chars and ints.

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...


-- 
							spl
Steve Lamont, sciViGuy			EMail:	spl at ncsc.org
North Carolina Supercomputing Center	Phone: (919) 248-1120
Box 12732/RTP, NC 27709