Comment by jstimpfle
2 years ago
You could call them composite in that sense, but in C, composite types are types that are composed of other C types (structs, unions, arrays, ... functions? Not 100% sure of the specifics).
Also, the representations of floats and doubles isn't precisely specified, at least IEEE754 is not a strict requirement (not sure about the technical implications from what's actually specified).
I'm not really sure I get why the distinction between composite and non-composite types is important if the only difference is that you can't easily access sub-parts of the non-composite types.
I guess we can cook up some arguments about language purity and orthogonality. Introducing literals that create composite types might indeed create some difficulties for existing compilers that want to follow the latest standard.
What kind of difficulties? I don't understand why this would make any difference from a compiler's perspective.
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I'm not the one making the argument, merely explaining why the GGP may have chosen this example.
Wasn't implying that! :)