On 2006-12-31 09:27:21 -0500, Robert Dewar wrote: > As I said earlier in this thread, people seem to think that the > standards committee invented something new here in making overflow > undefined, but I don't think that's the case. I personally would > have thought it more judicious to make it implementation defined, > since I don't like undefined semantics anywhere in programming > languages unless a hugely strong case can be made that providing > or requiring a definition damages code (e.g. uninitialized variables > have always been generally agreed to be in that class for C/Ada/Fortran > level languages, but even there Ada 95 greatly reduced the damage > that uninitialized variables can do, and introduced the notion of > bounded error to replace many undefined (called erroneous) cases > in Ada).
The compiler could have an optional mode where everything is defined. So, this is more a problem with the compiler than with the language. But this won't prevent from having bugs, possibly difficult to detect, in particular if behavior is implementation-defined instead of being fixed for every implementation. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
