On May 10, 2013, at 11:09 AM, Albert ARIBAUD albert.u.boot@aribaud.net wrote:
The compiler considers the name/symbol to be value, not the address of the corresponding object... at least most of the time: as you indicate, when the symbol denotes a C array, then the C compiler understand the symbol as the address of the array.
I ran into a case one on Codewarrior Mac PPC tools where there was a subtle different here. In an existing body of code there was originally a global char[] defined with a matching extern char[] declared in a header.
At some point the definition was changed to char* because the size of the array grew and we wanted it out of the global section. I traced an obscure crash to some assembly code that had worked when the definition was char[] but needed an extra level of indirection when it was char *.
During that debugging I found that the declaration had not been changed to char * but the C compiler hadn't cared. It handled the mixed forms just fine despite the clear difference in the code.
I surmised it was some subtle issue around PPC's handling of global data (or the Codewarrior PPC ABI) but still don't really know.
-Mike