"C" wish list.

Crispin Goswell caag at rlvd.UUCP
Fri Nov 8 01:16:03 AEST 1985


In article <6107 at utzoo.UUCP> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> ... I prefer ;'s as statement terminators.  Trying to look at it
>> objectively, I can see very little reason to prefer one or the other...
>
>		... Languages like Pascal and C are specified in terms of
>one-dimensional token streams, but that is *not* the form in which human
>beings deal with them.

Oh? How about:
	bar fred (a, b) foo a; baz b; { return wop (b, a); }
				    |			 |
			          Yick!	     Ick!	Ugh!
Pascal:					       |
	procedure fred (a : foo; b : baz) : bar; begin return wop (b, a) end

messy aren't they? in ALOGOL68, you get:

	PROC fred = (FOO a, BAZ b) bar: wop (b, a)

My functions would benefit from being laid out one-dimensionally (I often have
lots of small functions). I lay them out two dimensionally in C because they
look so bad if I don't. It is unwise to try to out-guess users...

	Crispin Goswell
P.S. I still claim to be a human being :-)



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list