Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!stan!dworkin
From: dworkin@Solbourne.COM (Dieter Muller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What I'd really like to see in an if-statement...
Message-ID: <1864@salgado.Solbourne.COM>
Date: 6 Aug 89 21:47:58 GMT
References: <5024@alvin.mcnc.org> <1300@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <456@helios.prosys.se> <14521@bfmny0.UUCP>
Reply-To: dworkin@Solbourne.com (Dieter Muller)
Organization: Solbourne Computer Inc., Longmont, Colorado
Lines: 27

In article <14521@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>What's wished for is a triadic comparison
>operator, which could then be used in any of the boolean contexts that
>a simple binary comparison can be used now.

I'd say what's wanted is more of an n-adic comparison operator, since
it is occassionally nice to say ``if (a < b < c < d)'', etc.  If you're
going to generalize, do it all the way.

>It would be fun to have such a thing, it would make expressing lots of
>conditions more concise and everyone would use it.  However it would
>break a lot of things in "C" (the expression above IS VALID C right now,
>for instance, with a totally different meaning) and parsing would be a
>nightmare.

Unfortunately quite correct.  Looks like another one of those ``in the
successor of C'' sorts of things (please, let's not get *that* started
again).  'Course, if someone felt ambitious, they could provide
both interpretations, selected by a #pragma.  If the construct appears
before the compiler sees one of the appropriate #pragma's, it generates
a warning and applies the "normal" interpretation.

Dieter
-- 
"Your spatial laws are ok, but God, the choices you give us." -- Deborah Blau
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