RE: [GD-General] The joy of type aliasing and C

[Neil S. <ne...@r0...>]

> Actually, if they had simply made it "implementation defined" 
> with some caveats, that would have helped, because in 
> practice this is all implementation defined and not truly 
> "undefined".  "Undefined" has connotations of causing your 
> computer to explode.

Thankfully, compiler vendors do generally define these things, although they
might not always put them in the manual. Perhaps this has something to do
with the fact that they have someone to answer to (their customers) if they
don't provide useful functionality.

> Well, I wouldn't go that far, because in reality there are 
> too many areas where what works in practice WILL explode on 
> other systems.  The
> x86 has made this an unfortunate problem.

That's why I said "this is a case where", rather than making a blanket
statement. ;)

> So I understand their rather dogmatic desire to make sure 
> everyone follow the rules, but I don't like the attitude that 
> "writing real software is unclean, even if you know what 
> rules you're breaking".

Thing is, they could make it clean if they had any interest at all in
practical matters, but they don't, so I have no sympathy for them.

> But I digress...the one thing I can definitely say I've taken 
> away from this is that when someone yells at me for 
> type-alias violation, I'll just turn around and say that code 
> is undefined and therefore THEY'RE WRONG TOO, HAH! =)

Or you could ask them to come up with a way of doing the same thing cleanly,
with no loss in performance, and see how far they get. ;)

- Neil.