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Specific Compiler Characteristics

Some compilers exhibit different behaviors.

Static/Dynamic Expressions

Autoconf relies on a trick to extract one bit of information from the C compiler: using negative array sizes. For instance the following excerpt of a C source demonstrates how to test whether ints are 4 bytes long:

int
main (void)
{
  static int test_array [sizeof (int) == 4 ? 1 : -1];
  test_array [0] = 0
  return 0;
}

To our knowledge, there is a single compiler that does not support this trick: the HP C compilers (the real one, not only the "bundled") on HP-UX 11.00:

$ cc -c -Ae +O2 +Onolimit conftest.c
cc: "conftest.c": error 1879: Variable-length arrays cannot \
    have static storage.

Autoconf works around this problem by casting sizeof (int) to long before comparing it.