Re: Ada Idioms Progress Preview

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>]

Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
> 
> * Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen wrote:
> >lutz@iks-jena.de (Lutz Donnerhacke) writes:
> >> It's not necessary to provide a buffer to hold any possible string of a
> >> given type if you can pass complex objects to or from a function. C can
> >> only pass primitive types and therefore switched to passing pointers of
> >> implicit terminated arrays.
> >
> >Close, but not quite. C will happily pass records by value.
> 
> Yep, interesting. Tested with a traditional compiler.
> 
> I wonder why C choosed to use inband signaling that heavily.
> They could use clear oob signaling for error signaling, array length ...
> But they don't. Why? Very strange.

You were almost correct in your earlier posting. The old K&R C did not
pass structs by value. That was an improvement added in ANSI C. 
The old K&R C could only pass primitives (int, float, double, 
etc and pointers) by value. The same restriction appeared for function
return values.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA