Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!gatech!ncsuvx!ecemwl!jnh
From: jnh@ecemwl.ncsu.edu (Joseph N. Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: This one bit me today
Message-ID: <4147@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 89 16:47:51 GMT
References: <2432@hub.UUCP> <568@sppy00.UUCP> <750@philmtl.philips.ca>
Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu
Reply-To: jnh@ecemwl.UUCP (Joseph N. Hall)
Organization: North Carolina State University
Lines: 31

In article <750@philmtl.philips.ca> ray@philmtl.philips.ca (Ray Dunn) writes:
>
>...
>No this *is* a flaw in the C grammer, because it does not take into account
>what a perfectly reasonably human is likely to do erroneously.
>
>To say that it is not the fault of 'C' which leaves this pitfall (and the
>others we know and love), for we mortals to fall into, is like blaming the
>driver in an accident caused by the car's gas and brake pedals being
>positioned too close.
>
>Obviously the driver is not operating the controls properly, but it is the
>design of the controls that makes it *easy* to make the mistake.

So, what?  Are you going to sue AT&T for designing a language in which it
is too easy to make mistakes?  Go back to ALGOL.

Personally, I don't consider any little "flaw" like this that rears its head
when programmers start deleting white space to be a matter of any
consequence.  C isn't intuitively unambiguous from a lexical standpoint
(unless you consider "greedy analysis" intuitive, rather than arbitrary),
but I'll be damned if I'm willing to give up those wonderful two- and
three-character operators, at least not until ASCII includes more than
128 standard characters.

I certainly hope "Consumer Reports" never rates programming languages ...

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