15 Aug
2005
15 Aug
'05
9:15 a.m.
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Huw Davies wrote:
I fail to see how i = i + 1 is not obvious to only but the most
simple-minded of people :)
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I agree that missing .'s did cause some problems
but I recall having
to debug far
fewer missing .'s compared to missing equal signs in c. The number of
times I've written
if (a = b) when I mean if (a == b) is the main reason I refuse to
write c programs (not even
for money).
Well, 2 feet or 24 inches, I guess. As a C programmer it eventually
becomes natural to be in a state of mind where you automatically use = for
assignments and == for compares. You still make the error occasionally,
but you (usually) realize it right away.
I made this very mistake in PHP a couple days ago (tsk tsk :)
The use of .
is quite warped and utterly against high level language
principles. (The only thing that even comes close is FORTH.)
Well the everything is an lvalue is different, but in some ways it's
easier to explain
i := .i + 1 to new programmers than i := i + 1 where the context of i
changes (it's even worse
in FORTRAN where the syntax is i = i + 1 given that FORTRAN was
written for maths/physics types....