Why "aliasing can cause paradoxical behavior"...

Some Subtleties of Aliasing

by Andrew Koenig

 

... As an example of a problem with this code, I suggested that it might be called by writing

 

scale(v, v[n]);

with the aim of dividing every element of v by v[n], but that this call would actually do something else entirely. From the comments on the article, I think that some readers were unclear about what that something else might be. To understand this call's behavior in detail, we have to look at the code more closely. ...