low-level knowledge of your friendly neighbourhood C compiler
Alan J Rosenthal
flaps at dgp.toronto.edu
Thu May 3 05:08:37 AEST 1990
henley at motcid.UUCP (Aaron Henley) writes:
>I think people should and in many cases must be aware of how their compiler
>allocates memory for structures, what happens when you typecast a word from a
>memory location starting at a point that isn't word aligned, etc... These and
>many other usages of C are ambiguously defined.
This is completely wrong. These things are UNDEFINED, not at all ambiguous.
The following two statements are both unambiguously false:
a) dereferencing a misaligned pointer in C dumps core; and
b) dereferencing a misaligned pointer in C doesn't dump core.
That's what undefined means. It doesn't mean that one of them is true.
ajr
More information about the Comp.std.c
mailing list