Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!milton!ogicse!intelhf!ichips!inews!pima!bhoughto From: bhoughto@pima.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: One more point regarding = and == (more flamage) Message-ID: <3197@inews.intel.com> Date: 23 Mar 91 03:35:06 GMT References: <13603@helios.TAMU.EDU> <3182@inews.intel.com> Sender: news@inews.intel.com Organization: Intel Corp, Chandler, AZ Lines: 67 In article mckulka@eldalonde.endor.cs.psu.edu (Christopher Mc Kulka) writes: >In article <3182@inews.intel.com> bhoughto@pima.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) writes: >>It's called top-down design, and involves _thinking_ before >>you start making mistakes. > >Ahhh, it must be perfect in a perfect world where people do not make mistakes >by *ACCIDENT*. Have you never missed an '=' or slipped in a ';' instead of a >',', or etc. Very little starts out bug-free, and very little more ends up bug-free. RTFM lint(1), adb(1), and man(7). >Last time I checked I usually found mistakes after *thinking* I did not make >any. I never think that, nor do I add irrelevant and redundant code which could add errors as easily as prevent them. I test my code, thoroughly and mercilessly, and if it's defective I offer to repair or replace it, at my discretion :-). >PS - If you have discovered a tonic that makes it possible to write programs > larger than "Hello, world." correctly the first time, PLEASE let the rest > of us know about it. We can *bury* Japan in a year. That depends on what you mean by "first time." As far as I'm concerned it's not actually written until it's shar'red up and sent off to Rich $alz, and then that's only Draft_0. RTFM diff(1) and patch(1gnu). We're already burying Japan. It's a well-known fact that the Japanese have been writing the sloggingest software in the history of computing since they discovered it takes instructions to motivate an instruction set. America owns the software industry [*]. (However, they are getting a massive lead in the natural-language-processing arena; one Japanese company has a program that will translate Japanese into English at 3000 words per hour). The grander point here is that if ( (*x = *y) != 0 ) tells me nothing, and the `!= 0' part merely tells me a piece of the nothing that I already know; in fact, I'm likely to examine the expression `(*x = *x) != 0' and compare its result to zero, in my head, just as the object code will do if the compiler doesn't know diddly about optimization. If you're going to bother adding information to your thesis, at least make it constructive and not obfuscatorily redundant. --Blair "/* end of posting */" /* the following must, therefore, be a bug */ [*] If you want to bury the Japanese in manufacturing, as well, well, that'll take a few dozen years of sweeping educational reform; it has to do with the consistent and widespread ability of the people understand the technologies they are implementing. We still think we're hot shit as a nation if Americans dominate Billboard's Top 40. P.P.S. What is this, talk.politics.flame.c.japanese?