For a pointer p, could p < p+1 be false in an extreme case?
Is it possible, for a pointer variable
p
, thatp<(p+1)
is false?
If p
points to a valid object (that is, one created according to the C++ object model) of the correct type, then no. p+1
will point to the memory location after that object, and will always compare greater than p
.
Otherwise, the behaviour of both the arithmetic and the comparison are undefined, so the result could be true, false, or a suffusion of yellow.
If yes, under which circumstances can this happen?
It might, or might not, happen with
p = reinterpret_cast<char*>(numeric_limits<uintptr_t>::max);
If pointer arithmetic works like unsigned integer arithmetic, then this might cause a numeric overflow such that p+1
has the value zero, and compares less than p
. Or it might do something else.
What if I'm programming on DOS, and I have a far pointer (one composed of a segment and an offset), and it's pointing to the last address in the segment, and I add one to it, and the pointer wraps around? It looks like when you're comparing them, you normalize the pointers, so the second pointer p+1
would be less than p
.
This is a stab in the dark though, I don't have a DOS C compiler handy to test on.
Very simple: It cannot happen if there is no undefined behaviour involved. It can happen very easily in the presence of undefined behaviour. For details, read a copy of the C Standard or C++ Standard.
As a result, a conforming compiler is allowed to not evaluate the < operator at all and use 1 or true as the result instead. The same is true for arithmetic with signed integers (but not for unsigned integers, where it is possible for entirely legal code to have x > x+1).
Your example code isn't even C or C++, so you seem to have used the compiler in a mode where it isn't a standard conforming C or C++ compiler.