Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!bionet!apple!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: learning C (was: Re: ambiguous ?)
Message-ID: <14124@lanl.gov>
Date: 25 Oct 89 22:02:34 GMT
References: <2523@munnari.oz.au>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 13

From article <2523@munnari.oz.au>, by ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe):
> Well, that depends.  To start with, temporary variables have the great
> merit of being a familiar means.  That's how you force argument
> evaluation order in Algol 60, Pascal, Ada, Fortran (66, 77, 8X), Modula,
> Lisp, Simula 67, ... 

Most of those languages also have _other_ means of forcing evaluation
order in useful contexts.  For example, all of the above mentioned 
languages allow the user to prohibit optimization of expressions
involving associative operators - using parenthesis.  The C argument
that parenthesis should be used _only_ for legibility always seemed
rather silly (especially in a language which otherwise makes so few
concessions for legibility).