dant@tekla.UUCP (04/24/87)
I can't stand just reading all this stuff about parens not being honored and unary plus, etc. without throwing my 20 mills in. I think there are two things which should be done about the "problems" people are having with this: 1. Remove floating point variable types from the language altogether. Yes, I know this would break a lot of existing code, but it can be made a long term goal for future standards. In the mean time, it would probably be best to make floating operations non-associative and not allow them to be rearranged. This is somewhat of a kludge, but putting floating types into a systems language was a kludge in the first place. (It doesn't have BCD arithmetic does it?) 2. Put in some mechanism to allow the programmer to trap integer overflows. This is more of a "nice to have" feature than a necessity, but occassionally it would really save a lot of cpu time. (Not only that, but even COBOL has this feature. :-) I know that this is feeping creaturism, but I'd trade the enum type for it any day. As for the unary plus, I'm not likely to use it except perhaps in initializations. --- Dan Tilque dant@tekla.tek.com