[fpc-devel] bitwise shift oddity a << b

[Jonas Maebe]

Martin Frb wrote:
> What is supposed to happen if the 2nd argument is negative?

I would propose to document it as "undefined behaviour", just like C 
does (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1124.pdf , 
section 4.5.7). The reason is that the behaviour can differ depending on 
the cpu, so if you want to guarantee consistent behaviour on all 
platforms, you can no longer just emit a shift left/right instruction 
and have to add all kinds of checks.

Maybe we should support emitting range checks for the right operand 
though (to give an error if it falls outside the range of shift values 
whose behaviour is defined).


Jonas