02-11-2010, 05:48 PM
I've a question concerning the following example:
I would expect any good static checker to report that x can never equal 255 here. But is 'case 255:' actually a MISRA 2004 rule violation? The C standard says that the switch expression x gets promoted to 'int' in this case, so the type of the case label 255 does match the type of the promoted switch expression. I can't find any MISRA rule that says that we should consider the underlying type (instead of the promoted type) of the switch variable when deciding whether a case label is allowed or not. If "case 255:" was the only case label on some code, then rule 14.1 (no unreachable code) would apply; but in this example, there is no unreachable code.
Code:
int8 x;
...
switch(x)
{
case 0: /* valid */
case 255: /* valid? */
case 1L: /* invalid, implicit cast from long to int */
...
}I would expect any good static checker to report that x can never equal 255 here. But is 'case 255:' actually a MISRA 2004 rule violation? The C standard says that the switch expression x gets promoted to 'int' in this case, so the type of the case label 255 does match the type of the promoted switch expression. I can't find any MISRA rule that says that we should consider the underlying type (instead of the promoted type) of the switch variable when deciding whether a case label is allowed or not. If "case 255:" was the only case label on some code, then rule 14.1 (no unreachable code) would apply; but in this example, there is no unreachable code.