Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: ambiguous ?
Message-ID: <14105@lanl.gov>
Date: 23 Oct 89 03:53:00 GMT
References: <1989Oct21.070728.8750@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 28

From article <1989Oct21.070728.8750@utzoo.uucp>, by henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer):
> [...]  bear in mind that TOPPS1 was an awful language (I speak as
> someone who programmed in it) and TOPPS2 made a whole bunch of, on
> the whole, badly needed changes.  Concluding that TOPPS2 was superior
> to TOPPS1 because of the side-effect issue alone is laughable.

Had I made such a conclusion, it would indeed have been laughable.
However, the paper I reference made a detailed study of TOPPS vs.
TOPPS2.  _AMONG_ their conclusions were that assignment should be
more than "just an operator".  In addition, they concluded that
programmers tend to think of the end-of-line as synonymous with
the end of a statement, that comments should also be terminated
by the end-of-line, etc..

However, it is not my intent to prove that side-effect operators
are bad.  I was only pointing out that, contrary to the claim
made by the previous article, the value of side-effect operators
was _NOT_ "well established".  In fact, I have found no articles
in _any_ journals which come to a conclusion that such operators
are anything other than detrimental.  The author of the article
in this newsgroup who originally made the claim has already
written email to me admitting that he had used the phrase "well
established" informally and that he was not even aware that any
research had been done on the issue.

Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I think you will have
to agree that the value of such operators is at best a subjective
assessment and is _not_ "well established".