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From: mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re:  Re: Precedent for use of =
Message-ID: <2183@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 13-Jul-86 22:17:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.2183
Posted: Sun Jul 13 22:17:12 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 14-Jul-86 19:27:22 EDT
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I don't buy your analogy.  We aren't talking about the presence or absence
of computer languages, after all, we're talking about what they should be
like.  We like to think that we know what cars ought to be like, and we
legislate accordingly.  Commercial airliners and railroads are even stronger
examples of the same thing.

The problem I'm having with the equality discussion (besides my feeling that
ASCII's lack of a one-character assignment operator) is that there's this
implicit (and occasionally explicitly stated notion) that terseness and
power are apriori virtues.  I'm not convinced that they are.  Verbosity 
cabn quite obviously be taken to excess; restrictions in the name of protecting
the programmer can also be taken to excess.  COBOL illustrates the former;
Pascal the latter.  The problem with C is that the extra power it offers
above other high level languages are all really shortcuts inherited from
assembly languages.  The "=" - "==" similarity plays upon this.  C extends
an opebn invitation to obscure hand optimizations and deliberately tricky
code, to the point where it gives the impression of being written for the
express purpose of allowing this.  The array-pointer ambiguity is another
example; people may rail all they want, but a lot of UNIX source plays upon
this ambiguity.

In my opinion, the question is whether or not these idiosyncrasies inherited
from minicomputer assembly languages are really desirable in this day and
age.  Six months of reading UNIX source have convinced me that they aren't.

Charley Wingate