This is not net.lang.algol!

Ray Lubinsky rwl at uvacs.UUCP
Sat Sep 14 00:21:26 AEST 1985


Dan <DHowell.ES at Xerox.ARPA> writes:
> Personally, I don't really like the {} braces of C, nor the "begin..end"
> of Pascal and its relatives.  This is one thing that Ada has going for
> it with its "if..then..endif" style.
> 
> I like to use these definitions:
> 
> #define IF if(
> #define THEN ){
> #define ELSE }else{
> #define ENDIF }
> 
 
> (Gee, I should write my own language)

Yes, indeed.  Or at least stop pretending that you're programming in C.  I make
a lot of use of the compiler macro facility, but I've always thought that
screwing around with the appearance of the language like this is a real
abomination.

Any body have a source license so that they can dig into the code of the Bourne
shell?  No offense to Bourne (his shell is one of my most-used programming
environments), but the code is a mess of defs like DO .. OD, LOOP .. POOL, etc.
I fail to see the advantage unless one is incapable of learning a new language
and is forced to under-utilize C by thinking of it as something else.

When I program in Pascal, I don't use a macro preprocessor so that I can make
the program look like C.  If I want to use C, then I use C.
-- 

Ray Lubinsky		     University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science
			     uucp: decvax!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!rwl



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