Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!hjm
From: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "for" loops in C ...
Message-ID: <867@cernvax.UUCP>
Date: 3 Nov 88 17:20:47 GMT
Reply-To: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Organization: CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
Lines: 25

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.
>
>						Tim Smith


Take a look at Knuth.  He uses a notation like next(a) to represent the
C statement a.next.  His argument goes something like this.  The
function next() is applied to a variable argument - next(a) or next(b)
- just like good ol' array indexing in FORTRAN - array(i).  Well, why
not?  BCPL made it very obvious that a[i] and i[a] are the same; it
used (uses?) a!i to mean *(a+i).  This works fine even for structure
access, until you have strong typing.  Guess what BCPL didn't have?  I,
personally, IMHO, would be happy with a[next] for structure access or
a.i for array access.  Isn't it all really the same and just a matter
of conditioning?  As I said, it's not obvious how strong typing would
work in such a language, but it would eliminate one more thing for the
compiler writers to have to do *and get right*. :-)

-- 

	Hubert Matthews