Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!joyce!sri-unix!garth!smryan
From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Many people's opinions on computer languages (was: Third public review of X3J11 C)
Message-ID: <1433@garth.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 88 01:50:07 GMT
References: <8365@smoke.ARPA> <225800053@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <8374@smoke.ARPA> <340@quintus.UUCP> <910@l.cc.purdue.edu> <8695@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <1386@garth.UUCP> <585@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 13

>>The lack of a boolean mode and the requirement that
>>&& and || shortcircuit are horrendous on a RISC.
>
>How is this different from saying "if is horrendous on a RISC"?
>That is what I'd have to write if not for && and ||.

If short-circuit && and || were not defined, then p && q and p || q
could be equivalent to p & q and p | q, with programmer responsible for
dangerous side-effects. In Ada this would perturb the code,
but it is not a problem in C or Algol because of the existence of conditional
expression.

In short, if you want p and q, use p&&q. If you want, if p then q else don't
bother with q, just say false, use p?q:false.