Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Power operator?
Message-ID: <553@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 88 09:44:25 GMT
References: <11169@brl-adm.ARPA> <10026@ut-sally.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 16


Seems to me that providing a power operator would violate, somewhat,
one of the most important aspects of C - the relatively simple mapping
between C operators and few, or even one, machine instruction.  I can't
think of any of the basic operators which don't map into a very small
number of machine instructions; even floating point numbers do if you
have some sort of floating point accelerator, even the most primitive.
Exponentiation, generally, does not map so easily.  Nor, for that matter,
do any of the trig functions, and I don't hear a lot of complaints about
the lack of a sine operator (whose symbol would be ~, of course :-)

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame