4 Jun
2007
4 Jun
'07
1:33 p.m.
On 4 Jun 2007 at 20:42, Antonio Carlini wrote:
The whole point of C was (is?) to be fast. So in
certain areas the
compiler writer is given a certain latitude to do whatever turns
out to be "best" for the compiler. So the standard writers aren't being
particularly capricious, they are deliberately avoiding tying down the
compiler writers with red tape.
Trudging even further afield from the topic at hand...
The odd thing about this is that it seems to be that the more
restrictive the language spec, the better an automatic optimizer is
able to work with the code. I mentioned that C pointers were misery
for an optimizer, while FORTRAN (absent various vendor extensions)
does not have them, making it easier to optimize automatically (at
least in the sense of determining side effects).
Cheers,
Chuck