cmt@myrias.UUCP (Chris Thomson) (08/13/87)
>>> [At its latest meeting, the X3J11 committee agreed in principle] that >>> parentheses should force grouping >> the waffling on this issue is starting to get annoying > The problem is, the public keep complaining about unary + and/or > the lack of grouping for parens. I've kept quiet until now, because the unary plus of draft C is a good (or at least acceptable) solution to a very thorny problem. I had hoped that the committee members would ignore the debate, since so much of it was uninformed. Apparently I was wrong. Keep unary +, don't make parentheses do more than syntactic grouping. The Fortran definition of parentheses was a mistake. Don't repeat it. It must be possible to do sensible optimization of C code, and it is most beneficial when macros are used, precisely where parentheses are thickest. Compiler writers and vendors, please speak up on this issue, preferably directly to an X3J11 committee member. Don't let your ability to supply optimizing compilers be abrogated. -- Chris Thomson, Myrias Research Corporation alberta!myrias!cmt 200 10328 81 Ave, Edmonton Alberta, Canada 403-432-1616