Article View: comp.std.c
Article #2333Re: functions within functions
From: Donald Lindsay
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 1991 23:41
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 1991 23:41
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In article <1991Jan22.081057.8567@ithaca.uucp> garry@ithaca.uucp (Garry Wiegand) writes: >When the C standards committee was meeting, did they discuss allowing >the declaration of functions within functions? >The name-space advantages should be obvious,... Some of us have used languages that allowed this, and didn't like it. Personal opinion: the outer functions get unreadable. Software engineering opinion: the inner ones get undocumented or even unexpected side effects, because they modify global variables. (Global to them, that is.) Compiler writer's opinion: the calling convention now has to support uplevel addressing. This is typically done at a cost of at least one extra instruction per call. This distributed overhead is paid by all calls - not just the ones that plan to uplevel-address - unless your compiler does interprocedural optimization. -- Don D.C.Lindsay .. temporarily at Carnegie Mellon Robotics
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ub!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!gandalf.cs.cmu.edu!lindsay From: lindsay@gandalf.cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: functions within functions Message-ID: <11681@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 26 Jan 91 23:41:10 GMT References: <1991Jan22.081057.8567@ithaca.uucp> Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 21