5[array] (was Re: "for" loops in C ...)

[Scott Bigham]

In article <10742 at cup.portal.com> ts at cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes:
>I don't know about i[ptr] being less readable than ptr[i].  Most people I
>have heard would say when describing an algorithm in English, "Then you take
>the ith element of the array and multiply by foo".  i[array]*foo has the
>words in C in the same order they would be spoken.

a[b] looks like an array reference, so, naive programmer that I am, I assume
that it _is_ an array reference.  In particular, I assume that a is an array
and b is an index into that array.  Something that does otherwise is less
readable to me, and I suspect I'm not alone.

The point is, is there ever any practical reason to use this construct?  Do
you ever use it?  Does anyone?

						sbigham

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