Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!gatech!purdue!umd5!eneevax!noise
From: noise@eneevax.UUCP (Johnson Noise)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Power operator?
Summary: Preprocessor
Message-ID: <1165@eneevax.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jan 88 20:58:08 GMT
References: <47000029@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <3933@uw-june.UUCP>
Reply-To: noise@eneevax.umd.edu.UUCP (Johnson Noise)
Organization: Elec. Eng. Dept., U of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
Lines: 18

In article <3933@uw-june.UUCP> pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel) writes:
>[Why isn't there a power (e.g., a**2) operator in C?]
>
>The original intent of C was simplicity.  Having ** is a fine idea,
>but we have to draw a line somewhere and it was defaulted for us by K&R
>a long time ago.  If we have ** then perhaps we should also have ||= ?
>

	I can concur with that.  But, if you really MUST have a power
operator, why not define one using the preprocessor? (I'm sure someone
must have already suggested this, but so what).  The subject of a power
operator is a bit sundry, I think.  I'm not sure, (correct me if I'm
wrong), but I think there are even languages that do not have bit operators
like &, |, !, ^, >>, << etc.  I remember back in the days of FORTRAN
when I actually had to write assembly routines to perform bit operations
on integers. Lots of silly overhead just for one instruction.
Anyway, C was designed to be used mostly for systems implementation, not
necessarily for number crunching.