That was a great comment, thanks a lot for the clarification! Another point that I've been missing from Linus' post is that sizeof is special also in that its

That was a great comment, thanks a lot for the clarification! Another point that I've been missing from Linus' post is that sizeof is special also in that its argument is never evaluated. sizeof launch_the_missiles() will never launch the missiles. Yet another specialty is that sizeof applied to an array has no array decar. if char buf[1024];, then sizeof buf is 1024, not a pointer size like 4 or 8. To me, it's not like a function at all. It's more like an assembler macro. I usually agree with Linus and learn a lot from his posts, but here I think he's unsuccessfully trying to find arguments for his (IMO, misleading) stylistic preferences.