Broken compilers (Was Portability of passing/operating on structures)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <7356 at ihlpl.ATT.COM> knudsen at ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen) writes:
>In article <73946 at sun.uucp>, jamesa%betelgeuse at Sun.COM (James D. Allen) writes:
>
>> 	struct {
>> 		whatever;
>> 	} st;
>> 	/* the next will be treated as though it were "foo(&st);"  */
>> 		foo(st);

I've been using C since version 6+, and I've never seen a compiler that
did that.  structs and unions have been passed by value since UNIX V7.

>This is my main objection to structure and array assignment and
>passing.  Aside from being hideously wasteful of time and stack space,
>they permit common typo errors (omission of &) to go undetected.

(a) hideously wasteful of time and stack space compared to WHAT?
    No-one is forcing you to pass structs by value if you don't want to.
    And if x and y are struct variables,
	x = y;
    should be at least as fast as anything you could have written to do
    the same job.  C hasn't got array assignment, otherwise the same
    remark would apply.  (struct assignment typically takes NO stack space.)

(b) cc is half a compiler.  The other half is called lint.  There has never
    been any reason why a C compiler couldn't give you a warning message
    when a call disagreed with a function definition in the same file; I've
    met a UNIX C compiler that did it (viva Orion!).