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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: Not intended for use in medical,
Date: 1997/05/06
Message-ID: <E9rMuy.Hs0@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 239897862
References: <3.0.32.19970423164855.00746db8@mail.4dcomm.com>
 <dewar.862775250@merv> <5kl9qc$g4d@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>
 <5kmek2$9re@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <5kmek2$9re@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>,
Kaz Kylheku <kaz@vision.crest.nt.com> wrote:
>>>  Yes, legal, but horrible. A good reminder of why Ada does NOT have
>>>  the ++ operator built in :-)
>
>By the way, the x++ is just another way of writing the assignment expression x
>+= 1, or x = x + 1 (the latter case evaluates x twice, of course).  The real
>``evil'' perhaps is that in C an assignment is an expression rather than a
>statement, so that you can decorate a complex expression with assignments all
>over the place.

I agree (except I'd remove "perhaps").  There's nothing wrong with
having short-hand notations like "++" and "+=".  The language design
flaw in C is that assignments return something "useful", thus
encouraging side effects nested within expressions, like a[i++].
I'm not against *all* kinds of side effects, but I'm against most of
them, including the one mentioned above.

- Bob