Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!itivax!vax3!scs
From: scs@vax3.iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Value, value, who's got the value?
Summary: I had an ulterior motive...
Message-ID: <1056@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 28 Apr 89 14:39:16 GMT
References: <1044@itivax.iti.org> <10149@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Sender: news@itivax.iti.org
Reply-To: scs@vax3.iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute
Lines: 23

In article <10149@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>Why are you posting these bugs, anyway?

Dreystadt and I had both just come out of a BLISS-10 programming
environment, and some of the C features we saw really smacked of
an expression language.  We experimented to see just how far it
went, and on the compiler we had at the time it was amazingly far.
The
	var = if ( test ) foo ; else bar ;
did work on that compiler, and it seemed to stick almost every
result into the value register whether needed or not.  In fact, the
only 'expression' whose value we couldn't pick up was a switch
statement.

Over time these 'features' seemed to go away.  I suspect this was
largely because of the development of 'void' as a type and permitting
structures as passed and returned values.  I wanted to see if (a)
anybody else had once used these 'features', and (b) if people thought
they were useful.  Just sneakily tossing out an idea...

   Steve Simmons         Just another midwestern boy
   scs@vax3.iti.org  -- or -- ...!sharkey!itivax!scs
         "Hey...you *can* get here from here!"