In September's issue of CUJ, there is a nice article (starts page 27)
by Stroustrup on VLA's...

Basically, he says there is no standard way of handling memory error's
when declaring a VLA and that the standard does not say that the
memory should be on heap or stack as well as a whole host of
other issues...

As an aside there is also a discussion on the keyword export in another article, which is worth a read.

In article <aj7675$317m$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter says...
>
>
>"Matthew Wilson" <matthew@thedjournal.com> wrote in message news:aj6raq$2mb4$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> It's bad that there seems to be no direction from the standards as to what happens during allocation failure. Makes writing standard compliant code more difficult. I must have a read of the standard when I get a spare
>minute
>> (in about 3 years!)
>
>I agree. There are also what appear to me to be errors in the examples given - perhaps because no compiler existed to try this stuff out on before it was standardized. The silence on error handling is another mistake. I also cannot figure out the point the 'static' array index is for (I know what it does, just not the why.)
>
>> It's good that you're allocating from the stack. Is that itself (as
>opposed
>> to getting from the heap) part of the standard? I seem to recall that it should be allocated from the heap, but the memory is vague.
>
>I don't think the standard makes any mention of that. It's supposed to be possible to implement standard C on a stackless architecture.
>
>

Thanks for the pointer. I agree with his assessment on the problems with VLA's.

<damiandixon@netscape.net> wrote in message news:akn8f0$2ftq$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> In September's issue of CUJ, there is a nice article (starts page 27)
> by Stroustrup on VLA's...
>
> Basically, he says there is no standard way of handling memory error's
> when declaring a VLA and that the standard does not say that the
> memory should be on heap or stack as well as a whole host of
> other issues...
>
> As an aside there is also a discussion on the keyword export in another article, which is worth a read.
>
> In article <aj7675$317m$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter says...
> >
> >
> >"Matthew Wilson" <matthew@thedjournal.com> wrote in message news:aj6raq$2mb4$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> >> It's bad that there seems to be no direction from the standards as to
what
> >> happens during allocation failure. Makes writing standard compliant
code
> >> more difficult. I must have a read of the standard when I get a spare
> >minute
> >> (in about 3 years!)
> >
> >I agree. There are also what appear to me to be errors in the examples given - perhaps because no compiler existed to try this stuff out on
before
> >it was standardized. The silence on error handling is another mistake. I also cannot figure out the point the 'static' array index is for (I know what it does, just not the why.)
> >
> >> It's good that you're allocating from the stack. Is that itself (as
> >opposed
> >> to getting from the heap) part of the standard? I seem to recall that
it
> >> should be allocated from the heap, but the memory is vague.
> >
> >I don't think the standard makes any mention of that. It's supposed to be possible to implement standard C on a stackless architecture.
> >
> >
>
>