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From: dlc@zog.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: WITH statement in C
Message-ID: <1003@zog.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 11-Jul-86 16:01:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: zog.1003
Posted: Fri Jul 11 16:01:08 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jul-86 06:16:55 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 20


     I dislike Pascal as much as the next C hacker, but one feature that could
be useful to add to C is something akin to the Pascal "WITH" statement.  Since
I haven't seen or read X3J11, I don't know if any new features are being added
to the language.  By using  such a construct, one avoids long statements when
using deeply nested structures/unions or the kludgy method of using defines.
I would mail this to a committee member, but I don't the address of any and
I figure one of them will probably read this.  In general, I don't advocate
adding new features to a language (after all, eventually it just turns into
creeping featurism :-), but some improvements are O.K.  I know everybody
seems that they want some pet construct/function/option in the ANSI standard,
so I'm no better than anyone else.  I'm only curious as to why nobody has
mentioned the desire for this construct (or bitched about its abscence :-)

Daryl Clevenger

P.S.
    I am not a frustrated Pascal user either, I detest the language.
    Also, no complete signature line, since I have no idea what the path
    to my site is through UUCP or anything but direct ARPA mail.