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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!decvax!wivax!apollo!alan
From: alan@apollo.UUCP (Alan Lehotsky)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: great quote about the "C" language
Message-ID: <196@apollo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Dec-83 09:09:19 EST
Article-I.D.: apollo.196
Posted: Wed Dec  7 09:09:19 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Dec-83 03:43:39 EST
References: <2288@utah-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, Mass.
Lines: 32

Regarding the comment from "Stan the Lep Hacker"

>>>  A. Evans of BBN has probably never had to write real programs, or else
>>>  has brainwashed himself into supporting Ada.

since I had Prof. Evans for a programming linguistics course when I was
at MIT, I tend to believe that he knows what he's talking about.
[ That's in addition to my own personal opinion that C is brain-damaged...]
From bitter experience, I know that language design is MUCH harder than
most people suspect.  Just look at the syntactic disaster in C for the
old form of assignment-operators such as:

        a =+ b          /* same as a += b, for non-trivia collectors... */

and consider the amusement possible when you feed a compiler something like...

        a =/* comment */ b;

Now, is this the same as:

        a = b;

or should it be parsed as:

        a =/  (*comment) * (/b);

and complain about the fact that the second "/" cannot be used
as a unary operator?

This may not be completely fair, cause they eventually did fix this
problem.  But there are other, equally obscure problems with C,
especially since the language definition isn't very definite.