Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!necntc!drilex!dricej
From: dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: priorities of = and == revisited
Message-ID: <453@drilex.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jan 88 19:26:29 GMT
References: <1175@ark.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson)
Organization: Data Resources/McGraw-Hill, Lexington, MA
Lines: 22

In article <1175@ark.cs.vu.nl> maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>Allright, maybe I was a bit hasty in putting aside the 'backward compatibility'
>argument. Further, it's generally good to give assignment low priority, I
>guess. But on the other hand, as Tom Truscott mentioned, "C converted from
>x =OP y to x OP= y without too much hassle", so why not enhancing the
>language further ?

Don't forget that the change of x =OP y to x OP= y was made during C's
youth, when there were few implementations and relatively few programs
written in C.  (Mostly just the Unix distribution itself.)  And both
forms were allowed for many years.  To make an incompatible changes,
where you could not continue the old forms for compatibility, today 
is almost impossible.

Face, if you really wanted to rearrange == vs = you needed to make some
strong arguments to DMR about 15 years ago.


-- 
Craig Jackson
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