Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: A bad design decision early on in ANSI C.
Message-ID: <1322@sugar.UUCP>
Date: 27 Dec 87 21:14:04 GMT
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 21
Summary: Bitten by a design flaw.

I would like to suggest removing a "feature" from 'C'.

Structure assignment/passing.

Unless you're going to go all the way and allow structures to be fully first
class objects (and presumably provide a way to overload operators so you can
do this meaningfully), it just adds confusion. It doesn't add any functionality
to the language over passing pointers and copying data. Usually I do that
anyway, since I know malloc() won't blow out my stack.

The worst effect, passing a structure instead of a pointer (or vice versa)
can be dealt with by function prototyping... but in the meanwhile there are
compilers out there that implement structure passing but not function
prototyping. A simple typo (leaving out an &) can ruin your whole day.

I still get bitten by this bug every now and then.

At least compiler designers should provide a switch to turn it off.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva  `-_-'  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
-- Disclaimer: These U aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.