It isn't a use case; it is a drawback of the C array and pointer semantics:
- Array values decay to pointers in rvalue contexts (though not as the argument of sizeof);
- a[b] is syntactic sugar for *(a+b).
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These two design decisions have some desirable results:
- Arrays, including strings, can be in effect passed as arguments to functions without implementing a special parameter-passing mechanism for arrays.
- Functions on arrays are implicitly generic over the array length, rather than that length being a part of their type. (When this isn't what you want you should probably be using a struct instead.)
- Array iteration state can be represented as a pointer, preventing bugs in which you index the wrong array. In a sense a single pointer represents an array range or slice, as long as you have some way to identify the array end, like nul-termination in strings or a separate length argument.
- You can change a variable (including a struct field) from being an embedded array to being a pointer to an array allocated elsewhere—or vice versa—without changing the code that uses it. (But if this had been a significant design consideration, -> wouldn't be a separate operator from . in C.)
- It's easy to create new "arrays" at runtime: just return a pointer to some memory.
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Like all design tradeoffs, these also have some drawbacks, which are so severe that no language of the current millennium has followed C's lead on this, although many of C's other design decisions are wildly popular:
- Bounds checking is impossible.
- Alias analysis for optimization is infeasible.
- If you aren't using a sentinel, you have to pass in a separate argument containing the array length whenever you pass in an array pointer, or stuff these base and limit fields into a slice struct, or something.
- Arguably, these decisions are hard to separate from the fact that C strings are terminated by a sentinel value and thus are not binary-safe.
- 3["hello"] is legal C.
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Of these five drawbacks, the fifth seems like it may not be as severe as the other four?
The thing is, the more complex a spec is (or rather, how much stuff it allows that will never be used), the bigger the danger is that somewhen down the line, this will introduce a security or other issue.
It however is not "natural" for someone who doesn't know the obscure bits of history in a standard written many decades ago.
Someone writing, say, a static code analysis tool or an IDE may not assume that it is possible that in the expression `a[b]` a may be something else than a pointer / array.
speculating, but don't think it's about use case so much as it is about it being a simple way to implement ('C is portable assembly') which probably carried through to our more current notion of this being a 'language level' thing
I imagine there are more optimal and less optimal ways of actually doing the indexing in machine code and the former may be better semantics, but I would think a compiler would generate identical machine code for both.
"Pointer arithmetic" takes care of that. Adding an integer to a pointer will multiply the size of the type pointed to by the integer and adds that to the pointer.
> (yes it will probably blow up in modern compilers, or at least give you a warning)
Nope. For the code snippet I posted an hour ago, even with -pedantic -Wall -Wextra gcc won't issue any warnings. And why should it? It's perfectly standards conformant, because the standard actually defines the [] operator through the equivalent addition expression.
I think the reason the behavior is still there because it is not used. There is no gain in changing the standard, and the compiler warning could draw criticism. Why waste your time solving a non problem?
Most compilers will warn about misleading indentation. This is misleading indexing. A program containing misleading indentation is also standards-compliant, but that's completely irrelevant when talking about what code should trigger warnings.
Misleading indentations, unused variables, unused goto labels and the like are a quite good indicator that there is something wrong here. The thing we are talking about here is issuing warnings for "but that's not how we usually do it".
When you add a new warning to a C compiler, you will break build processes all over the planet that have "-Werror" turned on and/or have management that insists on warnings being addressed. Some of those build processes compile decade old, safety critical production code. Code that has a couple hairy, stylistically sucky places in it. Code that sometimes does weird but perfectly valid things because those portions were ported over from assembly back in the 80ies. (And yes, I can guarantee you first hand that the situation I describe here is very real)
C compilers have become critical infrastructure and meddling with their internals and their behavior poses real word risks. Adding a whole new compiler warning must be carefully considered and better have a damn good reason.
"This pattern in the syntax tree strongly indicates that there is something wrong in the code" is a good reason.
"This is not how I usually write code" needlessly forces people to rewrite finicky code that has been working perfectly for decades in safety critical environments, for no reason other than you not liking e.g. the order of operator arguments.
> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
Yes, I'm not arguing against such warnings in general. I'm arguing against pure coding style type warnings.
Here's an example: If you do an '==' comparison inside an if, you might accidentally type '=' instead, making it a perfectly valid assignment.
The gcc developers eventually decided to issue a warning if you do an assignment inside an 'if' conditional, but give you the option to put another set of parantheses around if that's really what you want to do here. I think this is perfectly reasonable.
However, in the mean time, a lot of people have decided to adapt a coding style where you always put the constant or literal on the left hand side if possible, to avoid this issue. In theory, the gcc developers could in addition also have opted to issue warnings for comparisons if the left hand side is an lvalue and the right hand side a constant or literal, that you might want to flip it around. Thus enforcing a "safer coding style" through compiler warnings.
I'm arguing that the former is a perfectly reasonable thing for a compiler to do, while the later isn't.
Then again, it's not common that people make the mistake of confusing an array with an index. Misleading indentation is a somewhat common issue. So it makes sense to have the latter as a warning, but probably nobody thought of adding a warning for the former, or just decided to not bother coding it up.
I think that perhaps this has ventured into the job of linter or stylechecker. It's definitely not compiler warning territory.
When I learned C as a teenager from k&r I learned that these statements are absolutely equivalent, and I was surprised to see it even mentioned in TFA's README.
Yes, compilers should warn on indisputably poor style, even when program behaviour might still be correct. This is helpful to the programmer, who probably didn't intend to write their code that way.
Fortunately compilers already do this. GCC will warn you about unused variables, for instance.
> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
To this day, the best result regarding adoption of such tooling places it around 11%.
I wonder how much education we need to keep fighting for adoption.
