Re: [AD] Proposal: removal of zero-sized arrays

[Laurence Withers <lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Thursday 10 October 2002 10:13, Sven Sandberg wrote:
[snip]
> Probably tons of asm code needs to be rewritten. With zero-sized
> arrays it is:
>
>     line_ptr = bmp_ptr + static_offset
>
> Without zero-sized arrays it will be
>
>     line_ptr = *(bmp_ptr + static_offset)

Yes, you are right. I'm not sure about 'tons', though :-)

On Thursday 10 October 2002 08:55, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> >  - more generally, it is possible to statically-initialise
> > structures with zero-sized arrays (you might want to do this for
> > sub bitmaps etc. to make sure that their creation never fails, thus
> > simplifying your code)
>
> Don't you want to remove zero-sized arrays ?

A wording mistake. "More generally, it is possible to 
statically-initialise structures that currently use zero-sized arrays 
[if we make the change]". This is because it is not always possible to 
statically initialise a zero-sized array (as we discovered with dat2c). 
NB: by zero-sized arrays, I mean whatever you want to call unsized 
arrays in terminal positions.

On Thursday 10 October 2002 08:42, Christer Sandberg wrote:
> >  - dat2c will work nicely :-)
>
> Can be done in other ways as well. Won't it be necessary to call an
> init-function if you introduce this?

Nope, because you can write the line[] array or whatever as a static 
array, and then use the array name as a pointer to the first element 
(which, as discussed earlier, is a compile-time constant).

Bye for now,
- -- 
Laurence Withers,  lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx
(GnuPG 04A646EA) http://www.lwithers.demon.co.uk/
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