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From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Subject: Re: Coding for Obscurity
Date: 1997/11/26
Message-ID: <348c28b5.165149330@news.wxs.nl>#1/1
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Organization: World Access
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1997-11-26T00:00:00+00:00
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On 26 Nov 1997 00:37:28 GMT, nospam@somewhere.ia.us (Robert S. White)
wrote:

>In article <3479F8FB.2D7F@mWilden.com>, Mark@mWilden.com says...
>
>>But ?: is not an idiom; it's a part of the language definition. I'll
>>give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that when you think it
>>through, you understand it.
>
>  I _understood_ it in 1983.   But right now in thinking about 
>it, I'll say that it would have been better from a code maintenance
>point of view, that K&R had never thought of it as a convenient
>typing shortcut.  IMHO YMMV 

The idea of a conditinal expression was already in Algol, e.g. 

x := if i>0 then y else z;

Algol 68 extended this to case-expressions like b[case i in 6, 3 out 4
esac] := false, and allowed if then else and fi to be abbreviated to
(, |, |, ), giving either:

x := if i>0 then y else z fi;

or

x := ( i>0 | y | z );

In CPL and later BCPL the conditional expression was also abbreviated,
as in:

x := i>0 -> y , z;

This was changed to 

x = i>0 ? y : z;

in B, so the K in K&R you mention above is actually Ken Thompson.
This syntax was maintained unaltered in C.


==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal                     ~ ~
Amsterdam                   _____________  ~ ~
mcv@wxs.nl                 |_____________|||

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