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From: bjpt@mulga.OZ (Benjamin Thompson)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: YAAO  (yet another assignment operator)
Message-ID: <582@mulga.OZ>
Date: Wed, 19-Dec-84 19:21:49 EST
Article-I.D.: mulga.582
Posted: Wed Dec 19 19:21:49 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Dec-84 03:17:17 EST
References: <209@cmu-cs-k.ARPA> <529@vu44.UUCP> <6616@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Reply-To: bjpt@mulga.OZ (Benjamin Thompson)
Organization: Comp Sci, Melbourne Uni, Australia
Lines: 16
Summary: 


A bit of history :
Dean Rubine suggested a "->=" operator, to which the response has been mostly
negative. Ron@brl-tgr mentioned a more general "operator" (<binop>=).


The idea of <binop>= strikes me as a very good and very easy to implement idea.
Consider that 
		X <binop>= Y;		(call this form 1)
is exactly the same statement as
		X = X <binop> Y;	(call this form 2)

Given that <binop> is a legal operator, all C compilers already have code
to compile form 2.  All we have to do now is modify the compiler(s) to convert
form 1 to form 2.  This should be utterly trivial, and allows us to add a
nice bit of generality to C.