Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!ditmela!smart
From: smart@ditmela.oz (Robert Smart)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Declaration of multi-dimensional arrays.
Message-ID: <2304@ditmela.oz>
Date: 8 Sep 88 10:20:04 GMT
References: <8809032205.aa09007@PARIS.ICS.UCI.EDU> <8166@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: smart@ditmela.oz.au (Robert Smart)
Organization: CSIRO, Division of Information Technology, Australia
Lines: 24

In article <8166@alice.UUCP> bs@alice.UUCP (Bjarne Stroustrup) writes:
> ``subscript argument'' runs into a problem with C. a[1,2,3] is
> perfectly legal C and C++ (provided a is of a suitable type).
> Here ``a'' is subscripted by the comma expression (1,2,3) whose
> value is, of course, 3. 

The comma expression is a vile infelicity in C. It should be a
";" expression, and thus perfectly compatible with a sequence of
expressions within {}s. Then ","s could be reserved for what they
are good at: building up a compound object to be the parameter of
a procedure or the "index" of a multi-dimensional array or the
value of an array or struct (not just in initializations).

I realise that the reason for this is that it is incompatible with
the syntax of a "for" statement which obviously preceded the
invention of the comma expression (which show every sign of being
a horrible hack added at the last minute or later).

It's too late to fix C, but what happened to rumours of D (or was
it P, the next letter in BCPL)? It looks like C++ has been so
popular that it has killed any chance of other programming language
development in the unix heartland.

Bob Smart