rwl@uvacs.UUCP (Ray Lubinsky) (09/13/85)
Dan <DHowell.ES@Xerox.ARPA> writes: > Personally, I don't really like the {} braces of C, nor the "begin..end" > of Pascal and its relatives. This is one thing that Ada has going for > it with its "if..then..endif" style. > > I like to use these definitions: > > #define IF if( > #define THEN ){ > #define ELSE }else{ > #define ENDIF } > > (Gee, I should write my own language) Yes, indeed. Or at least stop pretending that you're programming in C. I make a lot of use of the compiler macro facility, but I've always thought that screwing around with the appearance of the language like this is a real abomination. Any body have a source license so that they can dig into the code of the Bourne shell? No offense to Bourne (his shell is one of my most-used programming environments), but the code is a mess of defs like DO .. OD, LOOP .. POOL, etc. I fail to see the advantage unless one is incapable of learning a new language and is forced to under-utilize C by thinking of it as something else. When I program in Pascal, I don't use a macro preprocessor so that I can make the program look like C. If I want to use C, then I use C. -- Ray Lubinsky University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science uucp: decvax!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!rwl
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (09/16/85)
> Any body have a source license so that they can dig into the code of the Bourne > shell? No offense to Bourne (his shell is one of my most-used programming > environments), but the code is a mess of defs like DO .. OD, LOOP .. POOL, etc. > I fail to see the advantage unless one is incapable of learning a new language > and is forced to under-utilize C by thinking of it as something else. I agree with the general comments (about not redefining the language to look like something else), but feel that Bourne is perhaps being maligned. I did a fair amount of maintenance work on the Algol-68 Bourne shell source and found that it was easy to work with once one got used to it (aye, there's the rub). Bourne's constructs avoided the need to worry about curly braces, which made code modification less error-prone. Fortunately, somebody (probably Dave Korn) turned the Bourne shell back into C for UNIX System V Release 2.0. I haven't looked at "adb" recently to see if the same is true there..