ambiguous ?

[Tapani Tarvainen]

In article <6611 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>  a reliable evaluation order
...
> the only time this matters is when your function
>arguments have a side effect; when this occurs in more than one argument; and
>when the side effect interact.

Another situation where order of evaluation matters (and in my -
admittedly limited - experience, a more common one, as well as harder
to circumvent when it really matters) is when intermediate overflows
or rounding errors are possible, especially with floating point
numbers.  (Ever tried to implement extended precision floating point
arithmetic with Dekker formulas or some such?)
-- 
Tapani Tarvainen    (tarvaine at tukki.jyu.fi, tarvainen at finjyu.bitnet)