C++ In a Nutshell

Expression Evaluation

At its most fundamental level, the execution of a C++ program is the successive evaluation of expressions, under the control of statements (Chapter 4), in which some expressions can produce side effects. Any expression might have one or more of the following side effects:

• Accessing a volatile object

• Modifying an object

• Calling a function in the standard library

• Calling any other function that has side effects

Sequence Points

During the execution of a program, there are well-defined points in time called sequence points, at which the side effects have all been completed for expressions that have been evaluated, and no side effects have been started for any unevaluated expression. Between sequence points, the compiler is free to reorder expressions in any way that preserves the original semantics. The same term also refers to the positions in the source code that produce sequence points when the code executes. You can usually ignore the details of sequence points, but when you are using global or volatile objects, it is important that you know exactly when it is safe to access those objects. That time is after a sequence point. Also, any expression that modifies a scalar object more than once between sequence points, or that examines a scalar object’s value after modifying it, yields undefined behavior. This rule often bites the unwary programmer who uses the increment and decrement operators. For example:

int i = 0; i = ++i - ++i; // Error: undefined behavior printf("%d,%d", ...