Re: Test for NaNs?
* Gabriel Dos Reis:
"Alf P. Steinbach" <alfps@start.no> writes:
[...]
| Perhaps you're right that the compiler lying to you "is" not surprising.
|
| It is, perhaps, as you indicate, the new reality of programming, that our tools
| can't be depended on, that that is what one should expect, that it isn't at all
| surprising that they do very different things from the documented behavior, or
| that one set of documentation contradicts another set, and that one should
| therefore simply try this, and that, and so on, more or less at random, until
| things work well enough to be usable or one decides that enough time's been
wasted.
In fact, dependability requires the user to read the documentation and
exercise competence and good judgment. It is hardly the tools fault
(in this specific case), when the documentations says that the switch
is for asserting that some property holds (therefore the compiler is
free to take advantage of it), yet at the same time, the user
knowingly wrote the contrary in the program.
I suspect it does not matter what the documentation of the C++
implementation says.
I have responded more in full to this else-thread, since you replied separately
to two parts of the same article. Suffice it to say here that in my view we
should not have to exercise "good judgement" to intuit whether a compiler option
will cause behavior that contradicts the C++ standard, or whether possibly our
library code will run afoul of such non-conformance with common compilers. C++
programming should in my opinion not have to be a guessing/testing game, and I
think (perhaps mistakenly?) that may be one reason why we have a C++ standard.
The only additional point here is that the last paragraph above contradicts the
next to last.
I think that must be a typo so I'm not going argue that particular point. :-)
Cheers & hth.,
- Alf
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