Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!ncifcrf!nlm-mcs!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Should I convert FORTRAN code to C?
Message-ID: <8184@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 29 Jun 88 16:52:18 GMT
References: <2742@utastro.UUCP> <20008@beta.UUCP> <224@raunvis.UUCP> <1189@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <20454@beta.lanl.gov> <829@garth.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) )
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <829@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>C does not provide custom data types either. It permits new structures,
>but those are not orthogonal to the primitive types: no new operators,
>no new casts, (on some implementation) no new assignments, ...

Wrong on all those counts.  C allows casting to any defined type and
assignment of any structure type.  (If you feel like using an array,
wrap a structure around it -- it's free.)  New operators can be
defined as macros or functions.  The one thing missing is overloading
of existing built-in operator tokens such as "*"; C++ supports that
but C does not.  However, operator overloading is vastly overrated;
most operations on extended data types do not map (unambiguously) onto
the conventional arithmetic operations.  Complex numbers are about the
only case that does.