[440] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: assignments as expressions

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thu Sep 22 19:37:25 1994 )

From: stewarta@netcom.com (Alex Stewart)
To: deforest@netcom.com (Robert de Forest)
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 16:01:20 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: coldstuff@netcom.com
In-Reply-To: <199409221806.LAA25493@netcom14.netcom.com> from "Robert de Forest" at Sep 22, 94 10:53:37 am

Crag, first of all, what the hell gives you the right to tell everybody else
what's ColdMUD and what isn't?  Give it a rest.  Nobody's listening.

As for assigment-expressions, this wouldn't have been a problem at all if Greg
hadn't chosen to stick with an antequated language's operator conventions and
make a clumsy hack to deal with the implications instead of just fixing the
language to begin with. (yes, C is an antequated language, despite anything
people may try to tell you, and in my opinion it's responsible for some of the
biggest problems in application programming today)

The real problem is that ColdC should never have had assigment be '=' anyway.
Using a mix of one-character and two-character operators in general is in my
opinion a bad design choice, but particularly using a one-character operator
that results in a very easy typo changing the meaning between two fairly
fundamental operations..

Anyway, enough bitching..  I'd just like to say that the solution I'd most
prefer would be to replace '=' with some other, two-character operator (like
':=' or something) and make it an expression.  Problem solved all round.  It
would make for easier reading, too.

-R
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