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From: dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: learning C declaration syntax
Message-ID: <9292@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 15-Sep-87 14:12:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9292
Posted: Tue Sep 15 14:12:03 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Sep-87 05:00:09 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
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>Further, if symbols are arcane and hard to learn, in all seriousness
>now, wouldn't it be better to say
>
>  A.    a SUBSCRIPTED BY i INDIRECT SELECT f INDIRECT INVOKE WITH x
>
>rather than
>
>  B.    a[i]^.f^(x)

Surely you jest.  First, A requires 59 characters to say what B says
in 11.  Second, I don't think A is any easier to read than B (really
I think it's harder to read).  Third, It's not giving any more
information or presenting it any less ambiguously.  So what's the
gain?

Maybe what's needed is a preprocessor along the lines of cdecl that
would produce such a human-readable listing from source code.  Like
cdecl, it should also be able to do the inverse: transform verbose
English-like code to C or Modula-2 or whatever.  This would allow
those preferring the verbose interface to use it without affecting the
rest of us or unduly burdening our compilers and storage systems.


-Dave