[PhilD]

Originally posted by General Tacticus:
And you can also make them believe that '<' means '>', or for that matter that "=" in the code means 'print("I'm a genius")' . But we are here to help compilers do the right thing, not to screw their settings and help them be total idiots

You've obviously never had to work on optimizing a compiler... (neither have I, but I do occasionally teach some programming)

Warning: Tech speak coming up. If you're only into computer games and not programming, maybe you should skip this. Well, maybe you should skip the whole thread, apart from the "we found the bug and it will be corrected in the next patch" bit.

If your function calls are guaranteed to not have any side effects, the rearrangement Arryn "suggested" is actually a good move; it makes the compiled program faster by saving a (potentially costly) function call. This is a case of the compiler "helping" a sloppy programmer (and all programmers are sloppy).

Of course, if your function call has a side effect, it's a very bad move because one call will not have the same side effect as two calls. In this case, calling the dice-rolling function has a side effect, since it modifies the state of the random generator, so it's pretty important.

I don't know enough of the C specification to say whether there's a keyword to let the compiler know that a given function call is guaranteed to not have any side effects, but I suppose some compilers can be tweaked to assume that they are...

[And I don't even know whether "side effect" is the correct English translation for the French "effet de bord"; all my teaching is done in French, I admit...]