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From: sbs@valid.UUCP (Steven Brian McKechnie Sargent)
Newsgroups: net.lang.mod2
Subject: Re: A Long Note on the Trichotomous String Comparison Example
Message-ID: <422@valid.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Jul-86 01:28:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: valid.422
Posted: Thu Jul 10 01:28:39 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Jul-86 21:37:40 EDT
References: <12221138454.23.PATTIS@WASHINGTON.ARPA>
Organization: Valid Logic, San Jose, CA
Lines: 29

I've been idly interested in Modula-2 for a little while, especially
since I admire the author of the decwrl compiler (Michael Powell) as
a fellow of fine judgement in these matters.  However, given the
length of discussion required to solve the rather trivial problem of
string comparison, I'm very concerned!  Perhaps I will delay the
plunge into strongly typed languages a little longer, and save some
wear and tear on my keyboard.

I'll close with a re-implementation of the UNIX(TM) library classic strcmp,
which assumes NUL-termination for every string, and does not attempt to
keep around a separate "length" field.

/*
 * Return greater than, equal to, or less than 0 depending on whether
 * s is greater than, equal to, or less than t.
 */
strcmp(s, t)
	register char *s, *t;
{
	while (*s++ == *t)
		if (*t++ == 0)
			return 0;
	return *--s - *t;
}


S.

(TM) UNIX is a trademark of my cat.