algol – Tarik Billa

What _did_ the C operators /\ and \/ do?

November 29, 2023 by Tarik

Neither /\ nor / are defined as operators in the ISO C89 standard, and I don’t think they were ever defined in any earlier version. And they are definitely not defined in C99 as far as I know. Here’s a draft of the ANSI C89 standard, for reference: http://flash-gordon.me.uk/ansi.c.txt (You are likely a victim of … Read more

What is “pass-by-name” and how does it work exactly?

May 22, 2023 by Tarik

I found a good explanation at Pass-By-Name Parameter Passing. Essentially, the body of a function is interpreted at call time after textually substituting the actual parameters into the function body. In this sense the evaluation method is similar to that of C preprocessor macros. By substituting the actual parameters into the function body, the function … Read more