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Quotes of the weekQuotes of the weekPosted Mar 15, 2007 6:29 UTC (Thu) by martin@zeroscale.com (guest, #5376)Parent article: Quotes of the week
Please explain! What does it do? Is Linus being ironic or is the piece of code superb?
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Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 8:32 UTC (Thu) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] Linus is as ironic as always, if you read the thread you will find a later comment from him that is more to the truth:
"Well, since Rusty's macro was hoddible *anyway*, I don't think I'd apply
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 12:01 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Given how Rusty's submission was couched "here's a special gcc thing we don't use yet" I presumed it was a joke. Wrong.
The eventual implementation is good style. The names of the pieces clearly say what they do, and are bite sized enough that you can confirm them. The first take was pretty WTF.
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 12:33 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] It's quite nifty.
Breaking it down:
#define ARRAY_SIZE(arr) (sizeof(arr) / sizeof((arr)[0])
This was the original. It works fine if arr is an array, but if it's a pointer, it'll return rubbish. (This is the one situation in which the decay of arrays to pointers is detectable. Obviously declaring a parameter using the [] syntactic sugar, e.g. char *argv[] doesn't help; it's still a pointer, not an array.)
The rest makes sense if you read it from the inside out (as is so often the case with C, and, for that matter, with bracketed expressions anywhere).
!!__builtin_types_compatible_p(typeof(arr), typeof(&arr[0]))
__builtin_types_compatible_p returns 1 if two types are compatible and 0 otherwise. This compares the type of arr to the type of the address of its first element (guaranteed to be a pointer even if the original was an array). It gets !!ed to ensure that the result is specifically 0 or 1 (GCC guarantees that in the docs right now, but it's easy to envisage a situation in which it returned 0 or some nonzero value. This guards against that happening.)
So now we need to arrange for that 1 value to lead to some sort of compiler warning.
sizeof(typeof(int[1 - 2*!!__builtin_types_compatible_p(typeof(arr), typeof(&arr[0]))])*0)
The bit inside the square brackets yields 1 if the types are incompatible (1 - 2*0) and -1 if it isn't. int[1] is a valid type; int[-1] isn't, and the compiler warns if you try to take its size; and that'll happen if arr is of a type compatible with a pointer (but not if it's an array).
Then the multiplication by zero eliminates any actual non-warning effects of all this code.
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 14:46 UTC (Thu) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link] Thank you for that intelligent explanation of Rusty's gobbledygook. Makes much more sense now.
Dave
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 16:07 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] This is the one situation in which the decay of arrays to pointers is detectable. Obviously declaring a parameter using the [] syntactic sugar, e.g. char *argv[] doesn't help; it's still a pointer, not an array.It's pretty inconsistent syntactic sugar at that. It's interesting that void f1(int *foo) is the same as void f1(int foo[]), but int *f2(void) is not the same as int f2(void)[].
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 15, 2007 19:55 UTC (Thu) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] Hats off - I looked at the !!blah stuff and my Java - it's a work thing :( - infected brain couldn't parse it. Bah - and to think I used to be able to grok quite convoluted expressions. 0 -> 1 -> 0 . n -> 0 -> 1 . Cool. Of course it didn't help that I was trying to guess the logic and side effects of __builtin_types_compatible_p(a,b) from the (scary) context. Which is why I'm not a kernel dev as well I guess!
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 16, 2007 9:59 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] I'm quite proud of this one, though it's probably not original. :)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 16, 2007 10:31 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I don't know, I've never seen anything quite like it. Operator mangling like that is fairly unusual in C because nobody can remember the precedence rules :)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 12:58 UTC (Sat) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] I thought everyone knew the rules for operator precedence in C and C-like languages: * and / bind more tightly than + and -, and everything else gets parentheses :-)(My Google-fu is letting me down, and I can't find the original author of that quote)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 16:28 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Yeah, exactly. It really gets confusing when *, ->, [], &, &&, andarithmetic operators all come and play together.
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 18:38 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] It really gets confusing when *, ->, [], [snip] and arithmetic operators all come and play together.Things would be simpler if *, both as a pointer declarator and as the dereference operator, were postfix (and as a consequence left-to-right associative, with the precedence level incremented by one). It looks weird, but that's mostly because we're not use to seeing it that way. It would be also consistent with the use of []. For example, the signal function would then be: ...which is a bit easier to untangle than the way it really is: That would also eliminate the need for ->, since one could just do this: ...which is consistent with: Of course there's no need for -> anyway, since there's no ambiquity between struct_var.foo and pointer_var.foo -- taking the member of a pointer doesn't make sense, so there's no need for a special operator. The compiler could just take care of this for us. It's probably too late to change. :-)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 18, 2007 1:53 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] This is of course exactly what Pascal, Ada and other related languages dowith ^. It *does* make more sense than the alternatives, but there's no chance of changing now :( hell, the precedence rules couldn't be changed when C was less than three years old (when && and || were introduced... with the wrong precedences for compatibility reasons), so I doubt a whole new operator could be introduced now :)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 24, 2007 5:21 UTC (Sat) by RareCactus (guest, #41198) [Link] Of course there's no need for -> anyway, since there's no ambiquity between struct_var.foo and pointer_var.foo -- taking the member of a pointer doesn't make sense, so there's no need for a special operator. The compiler could just take care of this for us.It's probably too late to change. :-) Having the language infer what you mean to do by the context is often a bad idea. If people want to dereference a pointer, they should use the dereference operator, not just silently have the language fill that in. And yes, the syntax of function pointers is fubar in C.
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 22:38 UTC (Sat) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] Operator mangling like that is fairly unusual in C because nobody can remember the precedence rules :) Yeah, that's why I included the parenthesis-riddled version. But then, why do you need to remember? I keep a copy of K&R 2nd ed where I can reach it without leaving this chair, just so I can look up finer points like this. For everybody else, I've put together this page. :)
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 19, 2007 15:03 UTC (Mon) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] For everybody else, I've put together this page. :)A very useful page, but shouldn't the type cast operator be merged with the prefix unary group, instead of being in a group by itself? I can compile this without error with gcc 4.1.0:
int main()
{
double foo = 1.0;
~(int)foo;
return 0;
}
If the type cast operator has lower precedence than the bitwise one's complement operator, then the later should be evaluated first, and the compiler would produce the error "wrong type argument to bit-complement."On the other hand, since these are both prefix operators and right-to-left associative, and if they both have the same precedence level, then the type cast will be evaluated first and there will be no error.
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 20, 2007 1:41 UTC (Tue) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] If the type cast operator has lower precedence than the bitwise one's complement operator, then the later should be evaluated first, and the compiler would produce the error "wrong type argument to bit-complement." Well, actually no, since the syntax of your example is that bitwise-complement is applied to the result of the cast, there's no way not to do the cast first. (The only other way to try to interpret it is that bitwise-complement applies to the type, but C syntax doesn't allow that interpretation.) You're right that it doesn't have any effect to separate cast out into its own grouping. However, I'm following the groupings in section A7 of K&R2, which puts casting into its own subsection, coming after the other prefix unary operators.
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 20, 2007 14:41 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Well, actually no, since the syntax of your example is that bitwise-complement is applied to the result of the cast, there's no way not to do the cast first.Exactly, which is why the type cast operator can't *really* be at a level below the unary prefix operators. If it was, then the one's complement would be evaluated first, which would produce an error since the operand is a floating-point number. I'm following the groupings in section A7 of K?R2, which puts casting into its own subsection, coming after the other prefix unary operators.Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look at K?R2 when I get home. There's also a grammar at the back of the book that might reveal why they put the type cast operator in a separate group.
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 24, 2007 15:06 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] By incidence, I used to have a very similar page scotched to the wardrobe near my desk (printed from TurboC 2.0 help system). Very useful during learning C :>
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 16, 2007 13:00 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] That's spooky... But brilliant! Just curious, are you a philosopher by trade?
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 16:04 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link] It's nice, but is it short enough?
a>b^a>c^c>b
Grokking convoluted expressions Posted Mar 17, 2007 22:42 UTC (Sat) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] Now that's devious :). Feel free to add it to the page.
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