Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1410

Fair enough.

I wasn't promoting it, I was trying to think of examples where it wouldn't be inherently evil, as opposed to in a more serious piece of work.

I was attempting to play devil's advocate I suppose. *shrug*

Not offhand, now. I don't really think it's worth trying to dream one up, I think it's difficult to prove there can't exist such an example.

Most of the time, yes.

Well, I have found some, usually a bug in the compiler that you need to work around (and you don't have source for it or time to wait on a patch).

The most recent one was a particularly inefficient code generation in one commercial compiler-library implementation which resulted in a 40% slowdown in overall application performance using the library function versus the inline replacement. It was conditional, you could turn off the optimization via a build option and fall back to the standard implementation if desired (or fixed in a later version of the compiler-library). For this particular application, it was critical to meet requirements.

It may depend upon the specific instructions being used. No, I can't think of a specific example right now.

So am I.

You asked a question, I took a stab at answering. *shrug* If you didn't want them raised, maybe you shouldn't have asked. :-)

It seems that I am pretty much in agreement with you throughout this thread, but I won't make the claim that it is impossible for a problem to need such an exception.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) "Making it hard to do stupid things often makes it hard to do smart ones too." -- Andrew Koenig