smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) (06/22/88)
I detect echoes of +:= *:= et cetera. A central principle in programming language design is don't look at previous work and avoid the landmines. A case in C was =+ =* =- and so forth. If the Revised A68 report chapter 9 had been studied with care, the ambiguity would have been immediately noticed. A case in Ada had to do with what every they call structure display. The long form is type-name(member1,...,membern) and short form is (member1,...,membern). If the short form only has one member, (member), it is ambiguous with a parenthised expression. Again the A68 directly dealt with this problem by requiring a collateral clause to have zero or more than one unit. One of the nicest things about the Revised Report was a complete and formal definition. It might take a bit work, but every question could be resolved. Why bother? Isn't much more fun to let each compiler have its own interpretation? comp.lang.c and comp.lang.ada consume a large bandwidth as people try to decide what is and is not legal and what it means. (I take it back--I have been informed C does have a formal definition: "Whatever PCC does on a VAX.")