Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!swbatl!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What I'd really like to see in an if-statement...
Message-ID: <5565@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 7 Aug 89 12:09:11 GMT
References: <5024@alvin.mcnc.org>
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 22

In article <5024@alvin.mcnc.org>, spl@mcnc.org (Steve Lamont) writes:
> 	if ( foo < bar < baz )

> Is there any reason why such a construction is not practical?

It complicates the language design for the sake of adding syntactic
sugar, but otherwise it's eminently practical.

> If not, why has
> no language (that I am aware of or can program in) implemented such a
> construction?  Good idea or bad idea?

Well, languages don't implement constructs, but semantic quibbling aside
the real-time control language Bob Pearson designed and I implemented at
Hydril Control Systems (for a product that was later dropped) had such
a construct. It was fairly easy to implement, at least in the Forth-based
recursive-descent parser I wrote.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "The sentence I am now
Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.   `-_-' |  writing is the sentence
Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today?  'U`  |  you are now reading"