Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!mcnc!ecsvax!dukeac!sbigham
From: sbigham@dukeac.UUCP (Scott Bigham)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: 5[array] (was Re: "for" loops in C ...)
Message-ID: <1076@dukeac.UUCP>
Date: 3 Nov 88 00:50:15 GMT
References: <14999@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <4700019@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <6945@cdis-1 <10742@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: sbigham@dukeac.UUCP (Scott Bigham)
Organization: Academic Computing, Duke University, Durham, NC
Lines: 20

In article <10742@cup.portal.com> ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes:
>I don't know about i[ptr] being less readable than ptr[i].  Most people I
>have heard would say when describing an algorithm in English, "Then you take
>the ith element of the array and multiply by foo".  i[array]*foo has the
>words in C in the same order they would be spoken.

a[b] looks like an array reference, so, naive programmer that I am, I assume
that it _is_ an array reference.  In particular, I assume that a is an array
and b is an index into that array.  Something that does otherwise is less
readable to me, and I suspect I'm not alone.

The point is, is there ever any practical reason to use this construct?  Do
you ever use it?  Does anyone?

						sbigham

-- 
Scott Bigham                         "The opinions expressed above represent
Internet sbigham@dukeac.ac.duke.edu   me and everyone that agrees with me.
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