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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Complexity of syntax
Message-ID: <361@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 91 23:19:00 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 35

In article  <1991Jan7.185658.20240@basho.uucp> John Lacey writes:
]brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
]>Every coding stylebook I've seen recommends that you give names to
]>everything. It's a very good idea, you know.
]...
]Do you really gives names to everything?  Every integer constant,
]every string, every character?  Or do you let them go nameless?

More importantly, do you always give names to intermediate objects?
In C you have to give a name to a struct within a function when all
you are going to do is return it.  For integers you write

  return i + 1;

not 

  res = i + 1; return res;

But for structs you have to write

  res = malloc(sizeof(foo)); res.f1 = x1; res.f2 = x2;...; return res;

instead of

  return res(x1,x2,...);

Personally, I think this constitutes an important difference between
integers and structs in C.  I'm not sure that the term "first class"
should be used to make this distinction, though (a few weeks ago I
_knew_ that this usage of the term was wrong, but now I'm not so
sure).
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman