Bliss was Re: DEC program listing

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Huw Davies wrote:

> 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....

I fail to see how i = i + 1 is not obvious to only but the most
simple-minded of people :)

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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