Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!hc!lanl!beta!jlg From: jlg@beta.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Expression syntax in programming languages. Keywords: C FORTRAN exponentiation Message-ID: <20667@beta.lanl.gov> Date: 11 Jul 88 20:11:35 GMT References: <3136@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19633@watmath.waterloo.edu> <20666@beta.lanl.gov> Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory Lines: 21 In article <20666@beta.lanl.gov>, jlg@beta.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: > [...] As I > said before, if you're going to do something for which there is already > a widely recognized syntactical convention - use the convention unless > there is a really compelling reason against it. (By 'really compelling', > I mean avoidance of syntactic ambiguity, constraints of the character > set, or constraints of the hardware - things like that. 'Whim' is not > compelling.) Another reason that isn't compelling is the one most C user have: "C doesn't do it, so it must not be good." This is similar to the other silly religious argument (oft heard, seldom true): "C does it this way, so it must be good." The point is that C (like all other programming languages) has some faults. I'm trying to identify some general guidelines for identifying faults and inadequacies in programming languages so that future designers can avoid them. One such guideline is given above. J. Giles Los Alamos