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