Where should the type information be 168
Peter, et al,
Yes, I understand that. TOPS-10 had oodles of customers who did exactly the same thing. The trick is to...
Not really. There is a reasonable precedence that ALL pre-C languages followed, but which apparently the authors of C didn't even look at. C and its decedents are the ONLY languages (that I know of) to screw up the operator precedence.
WRONG! THIS was the crucial issue that seems to elude everyone who looks at it. There are NO KNOWN statements that require the erroneous operator precedence! If you fixed it tomorrow, it probably wouldn't break ANY running code, and might indeed fix a few bugs.
In any case, there is a third less-controvercial option - to issue nastygrams when people use operators in an unreasonable or ambiguous way, rather than trying to make runnable code of obvious garbage.
There are plenty of other languages with similar operators that got the precedence right. Jovial preceeded C, is very similar to C, yet got the precedence right.
... and if you miss one, you may bury a VERY nasty bug into your code, where your code reads to be doing what is expected, but in fact does something quite different. To me, this seems like perverse and excessive punishment for a stylistic flaw. Wouldn't it be more reasonable just to wire the keyboard to lightning the programmer when flaws in style are detected?! At least that feedback could be immediate for effective training, rather than after a frustrating day of debugging. Obviously, at minimum, a nastygram is in order for these situations.
Herman Rubin operators, Herman: I have been foollowing your comments on programming language on the internet for over ten years now. It is obvious that you have strong opinions...
Steve Richfie1d
Where should the type information be 169
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