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From: jlg@lanl-a.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Fortran vs. C
Message-ID: <10732@lanl-a.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Jul-84 13:45:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: lanl-a.10732
Posted: Thu Jul 19 13:45:43 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Jul-84 03:13:20 EDT
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 16

>Yes, C also reassociates supposedly associative operators as in
>        a = b + (c + d);
>This issue is being discussed in the ANSI standardization effort.
>Meanwhile, one can obtain the desired associativity by breaking
>the computation up into substatements; admittedly not as nice as
>letting parentheses determine order of evaluation, but guaranteed
>to work.  It is a bit unfair to expect C to follow Fortran rules
>rather than its own; if the rules should be changed then let the
>standards people know and maybe they will be (if possible without
>breaking existing code).


But it's NOT unfair to point out that this problem is a weakness of C!
After all the subject of this exchange is "Fortran vs. C".

					J.L. Giles