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From: Richard_s_Stoneston@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Complex type ?
Message-ID: <1015@cup.portal.com>
Date: Sun, 18-Oct-87 00:06:04 EDT
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Posted: Sun Oct 18 00:06:04 1987
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Well, here's my two cents regarding the future use of type complex in C.
As you may know, C's advantage is its smallness, and porting versions of
the compiler around is easy enough to do because of this advantage. One reason
that Fortran has a complex type is that it is a mathematical language. (So is
APL= but it doesn't have complex) But, Fortran has NO structure definition in
the language, so it is even more necessary for it to provide this type.  C,
on the other hand, can define types very easily through typedef and struct
and enum.  All you have to do is define the code to handle the types.
You don't have to require that the complex definition, as an example, need to
be inside the parser.