"Honour Parens" Rule (was: Re: Should I convert FORTRAN code to C?)

Eric A. Raymond eric at nova.laic.uucp
Fri Jun 24 06:58:53 AEST 1988


In article <6958 at ki4pv.uucp>, tanner at ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) writes:
> While the unary plus was something of a stomach-turner ....

Come on people.  Haven't we learned anything yet about semantics of
programming languages.  If you want to enforce the sequential nature
of a set of constructs, use an explicit operator (i.e.
sequential-eval) to denote that.  Don't rely upon some side-effect of
another operator with different semantics.  (I always thought '+' meant plus.)

Maybe a leeson can be learned from Lisp world, where we have
sequential and parallel forms of binding (i.e. let* .vs. let). 
(And by the way, Lisp enforces left to right eval of function
arguments.  So flame on something else, if you please.)

Eric A. Raymond  - ...ucbvax!sun!sunncal!leadsv!laic!eric



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