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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: CDECL source code
Message-ID: <14560@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 23 Nov 90 17:21:01 GMT
References: <5656@abaa.UUCP> <12671@ganymede.inmos.co.uk>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <12671@ganymede.inmos.co.uk> conor@inmos.co.uk (Conor O'Neill) writes:
>Doesn't anybody else see the irony of needing a program to write
>C declaration syntax?

"cdecl" actually translates the other way around, but...

>And some people teach this language to beginners....

While I don't think that C is a good choice for a first programming
language, C declarations are not hard to code if one has learned C
properly.  For one thing, typedefs can always be used to make the
nesting easy to handle.  The conceptual complexity of "pointer to
arrays of pointers to functions taking structures containing ..."
is the same no matter what syntax is used to declare it; such types
are sufficiently complex that the mind can't take in all the aspects
at once, but must analyze it in steps.  Properly selected typedefs
can materially assist in that analysis.