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From: roy@phri.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: C builtin functions
Message-ID: <2321@phri.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 22-Apr-86 21:43:49 EST
Article-I.D.: phri.2321
Posted: Tue Apr 22 21:43:49 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Apr-86 06:36:38 EST
References: <443@3comvax.UUCP> <7900003@ztivax.UUCP> <584@ihdev.UUCP> <6584@utzoo.UUCP> <596@ihdev.UUCP> <729@bentley.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 19
Summary: min and max used to be C builtins

In article <729@bentley.UUCP> kwh@bentley.UUCP (KW Heuer) writes:
> 
> I might support the idea of additional operators [...] Binary "><" for
> min(), "<>" for max()?

	A bunch of years ago I ported the PWB (or was it v7?) C compiler to
a v6 system (turned out to be fairly trivial; bootstrapping long constants
was the only tricky part).  Much to my surprise, the lexical analyzer had
commented-out code to recognize "/\" for max and "\/" for min.  There were
even entries for these operators in the code tables.

	We never tested it out, but I think all we had to do was un-comment
a few things here and there and we would have had builtin min and max
operators in C.  I suppose it's a good thing we didn't -- talk about
non-portable code! :-)
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016