Where should the type information be 141

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:53:54 -0700, Steve

Well, yes, they are different, and do different things. The first is a conditional operator, much like an if() that returns a result, the second is a bit-wise binary logic operator. Both take integer expressions as arguments, and return integer results.

The compiler can't tell what your intent is. It can only check types and syntax. Admittedly, some compilers are growing warnings that also know about certain idiomatic uses, and complain about other forms. This sort of thing is sometimes useful, but often just annoying.

How so? A compiler that created a new "boolean" type to be the result of comparison operators, and which restricted combinations of this type with other integers wouln't be able to call itself C, and so it wouldn't matter.

Why would you expect there to be a speed difference, though, one way or the other?

I think so, given the way you've been using the terms. Obviously, you use bit-wise operators to perform bit-wise operations, and logical operators to evaluate conditions.

Examples? I think that you're calling && and the boolean operators? These are very well defined, as far as I know. What's a bit-wise logical operand? Some random integer? Where does the unpredictability come from?

I'll admit that there's not a lot that can be done, that way around, since the standard doesn't specify which non-zero value is produced (?) I haven't checked a standard recently, and can't remember ever seeing such a construct used. Is it really unspecified, or are they defined to produce 0 and 1? I imagine that there could be some hardware that naturally produces something like 0 and -1, in deference to other languages like Basic or Forth, but I haven't met one. There aren't very many processors that produce "values" for comparison results at all. Most have to do the machine-code equivalent of ((cond) ? 1 : 0) in order to produce an actual result value. Fortunately, this is hardly ever necessary.

How about the programmers take a few minutes to learn the language? They're not really very similar operators at all.

I don't think that the problem that you're describing is significant, in practice.

-- Andrew