darryl@ISM780.UUCP (08/30/85)
There is no such thing as an "assignment statement" in C. Rather, assignment is just one more binary operator, and the language supports the "expression statement". What you have written, c - a;, is just another expression statement, that merely has no side effects. According to the Unix philosophy, this is perfectly ok, and (if you have a PCC compiler) it probably generates the code to load up the values and do the subtract (why? beacause you asked it to). Hence lint. Lint will also warn you about using = in conditionals where you might have meant ==. --Darryl Richman, INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. ...!cca!ima!ism780!darryl The views expressed above are my opinions only.