Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!sun-barr!ames!ncar!ico!ism780c!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What I'd really like to see in an if-statement...
Message-ID: <14223@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 8 Aug 89 01:46:23 GMT
References: <5024@alvin.mcnc.org> <1300@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <456@helios.prosys.se> <14521@bfmny0.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 17

In article <14521@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>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.  I wouldn't hold my breath.

It would "break a lot of things in C"?  I admit that "x<y<z" is currently
valid C, but I seriously doubt that it gets used heavily!  (Outside the
Obfuscated C Contest, anyway.)  And I doubt that the parse is any more
difficult than the dangling-else problem.

But still, it would be a new wart in a language that already has too many.  If
it could be defined in such a way that the language became *simpler*, I'd like
it a lot more.  (The ICON semantics come to mind.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint