Talk:Unspecified behavior

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Unspecified behavior article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

A fact from Unspecified behavior appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 1 December 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that a valid computer program supplied with correct data may still exhibit unspecified behavior?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/December.

Wikipedia

Computing Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

C/C++ Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject C/C++, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of C and C++ topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.C/C++Wikipedia:WikiProject C/C++Template:WikiProject C/C++C/C++ articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Whose behavior?

While it may be well-known to programmers, the article (especially the intro) is rather vague and unspecified about the behavior that is the subject of this article. Is it behavior on the part of the compiler itself, on the part of the hardware running the compiled program, or what? This should be understandable to laymen, and I don't know enough to make the change. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 15:43, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've further altered your edit, as it was not strictly correct. I definitely see your point, though. Will try to come up with a better wording. decltype (talk) 15:56, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Seldom encountered

I reverted the bit about UsB being seldom encountered. It is true that externally visible UsB is not so frequent, but even the simplest of programs are likely to contain some code whose behavior is not fully defined, and where the compiler is not required to document its behavior. I'm thinking for example about the order of construction / destruction of temporaries in an expression like "a = b + c", or the order of the function calls in code like "f(g(), h())". These are specified in Java, but not in most languages. decltype (talk) 21:02, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]