(j3.2006) Fw: a question on MERGE and expression evaluation

[Jim Xia]

> This question gets asked repeatedly on the j3 email list.  The most 
> recent reply I found was from Malcolm, in reply to Bob. I'll paste that 
> in below. 


I'm not convinced that all these answers are correct.  The quoted text in 
previous replied are from clause 7 (on expression), and what they say is 
"you can omit expression evaluation if you're sure what the expression 
must be evaluated to".  That's about operations evaluation like "expr1 
.op. expr2" where you know the evaluation is true by evaluating expr1. 
This is not what's happening here: "Merge(1/a, 0.0, a > 0)" is a function 
reference, right?  And 12.5.3 seems to say 1.0/a should be evaluated at 
the function call.




What do we say about this mandate?

Cheers,

              However, I do think that an implementation that DOES 
evaluate 
> all of the arguments first is still standard conforming, so the behavior 

> would not be the same in all cases.  In the particular example you 
> showed, assuming that traps on divide-by-zero are not set, the code 
> should be fine. It amounts to  merge(infinity, 0, a>0) which would 
> evaluate to 0.
> 

Jim Xia

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