Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!lambda!jlg
From: jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: NOT Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C
Message-ID: <14204@lambda.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 90 02:09:20 GMT
References: <15706@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Lines: 22

From article <15706@haddock.ima.isc.com>, by karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer):
> "Fixed in ANSI C."  Also, you're claiming that all implementations of Fortran,
> Pascal, etc. inhibit optimization around parentheses.  I'm not convinced that
> this has been true in practice.

If any implementation reorders expressions by ignoring parenthesis, it is
not standard conforming.  The vendor of such a compiler might find business
falling off - or even law suits (if they claim conformance).  Certainly
they should expect complaints.  In any case, being non-standard makes the
premise of your statement invalid: if they aren't standard (at least
as far as anyone knows), then they aren't implementations of the respective
language.

As for expression ordering being "Fixed in ANSI C", I'd like to know
_HOW_.  I don't have a final copy of the standard, so I'm a little
behind about what it finally contained.  There was some talk of munging
up the plus (+) operator for expression ordering.  I _HOPE_ they didn't
settle on this particular solution.  Parenthesis is the best solution
I've seen implemented (or proposed) in any language so far.  Further,
most programmers (non-C) expect parenthesis to have this function.

J. Giles