Re: [TYPES] Declarative vs imperative

[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]

Robbert Krebbers writes:

> Let me then notice that in the case of C, it is worse than just 
> non-determinism. 

I do not believe that "non-determinism" is the right take on it.  C was
designed to be a deterministic programming language, at least in its
sequential programming fragment, but various aspects of behaviour are left
"undefined" or "unspecified".  So, the programmer is required to avoid all
the undefined/unspecified aspects of behaviour.  Any apparent
non-determinism in a C program constitutes a programming bug.

For people that think that a compiler determines the language rather than
the language definition, this might come as a huge shock.  That is
precisely how I intended it to be.

> There are also so called sequence point violations, 
> which happen if you modify an object more than once (or read after 
> you've modified it) in between two sequence points. For example
> 
>    int x = 0;
>    int main() {
>      printf("%d ", (x = 3) + (x = 4));
>      printf("%d\n", x);
>      return 0;
>    }
> 
> not just randomly prints "7 3" or "7 4", but instead gives rise to 
> undefined behavior, and could print arbitrary nonsense.

So, when the C definition tells you that "x = 3" is an "expression" rather
than a "statement", it is a huge lie.  Expressions are not supposed to
change the state, despite the fact that a lot of library functions of C do
precisely that.

Those of us that stopped teaching C in our undergraduate curricula did so
for very good reasons.

Cheers,
Uday