Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!pyramid!leadsv!laic!nova!eric From: eric@nova.laic.uucp (Eric A. Raymond) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: "Honour Parens" Rule (was: Re: Should I convert FORTRAN code to C?) Summary: Or more explicitly .... Message-ID: <274@laic.UUCP> Date: 23 Jun 88 20:58:53 GMT References: <2742@utastro.UUCP> <20008@beta.UUCP> <10655@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6958@ki4pv.uucp> Sender: news@laic.UUCP Lines: 14 In article <6958@ki4pv.uucp>, tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) writes: > While the unary plus was something of a stomach-turner .... Come on people. Haven't we learned anything yet about semantics of programming languages. If you want to enforce the sequential nature of a set of constructs, use an explicit operator (i.e. sequential-eval) to denote that. Don't rely upon some side-effect of another operator with different semantics. (I always thought '+' meant plus.) Maybe a leeson can be learned from Lisp world, where we have sequential and parallel forms of binding (i.e. let* .vs. let). (And by the way, Lisp enforces left to right eval of function arguments. So flame on something else, if you please.) Eric A. Raymond - ...ucbvax!sun!sunncal!leadsv!laic!eric