Doctor C's Pointers

[Stephen Clamage]

nickh at wotk.UUCP (Nick Hennenfent) writes:

>(            "abcd"[i] and f()[j]                                )
>                           ^^^^^
>I thought this was taboo. What's the story on this?

In ANSI C, it's perfectly ok, as long as f() is declared to return a
pointer type.  Many earlier C compilers did not support this, however,
and its portability was not guaranteed.  Any conforming ANSI compiler
must allow it.

Similarly, if f() returns a struct type with member x, you could write
f().x, and if f() returns a pointer to a function, you could write f()().

I make no comment on whether any of this is good programming practice.
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve at taumet.com