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From: karl@haddock.UUCP (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Complex type ?
Message-ID: <480@haddock.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-May-87 11:07:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: haddock.480
Posted: Thu May  7 11:07:36 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 09:09:47 EDT
References: <7264@brl-adm.ARPA> <1148@ius2.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ISC.COM.UUCP (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 17
Summary: use c++

In article <1148@ius2.cs.cmu.edu> edw@ius2.cs.cmu.edu (Eddie Wyatt) writes:
|In article <7264@brl-adm.ARPA>, lyle@ads.arpa (Lyle Bacon) writes:
|>C is an evolving language.  I will make a possibly sacrilegious suggestion
|>that the type "complex" be incorporated.  After all, such a type is now a
|>part of LISP (Common).  [Using a struct complex is inelegant because] the
|>resultant code form using structures and functions is much less readable and
|>harder to check.
|
|Sounds like you should be programming in ADA or some other data abstract
|language.

I would recommend C++.  It's almost entirely upward compatible with C, and
allows you to assign operator semantics for new types.  This has already been
done for "complex", so you can write "z = z1 * z2 * z3" which seems to be what
you want.  (Also, this will generate inline code, not a function call.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint