Re: C like op= proposal

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On 15 Aug 1999, Ray Blaak wrote:
> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:
> > lhs := @ + 1;                  -- C: lhs++;
> > lhs := @ * 5;                  -- C: lhs *= 5;
> > lhs := 1/@ + 5*(@/2 + @ ** 2); -- C doesn't do so good here either!
> 
> This is not worth the trouble of changing the language, especially considering
> that one can already do this:
> 
> declare
>   lhs : Some_Type renames Long_And_Complicated_Lvalue;
> begin
>   lhs := lhs + 1;                  -- C: lhs++;
>   lhs := lhs * 5;                  -- C: lhs *= 5;
>   lhs := 1/lhs + 5*(lhs/2 + lhs ** 2); -- C doesn't do so good here either!
> end;

Well, that won't work for the case I described, in which lhs is or
contains an array being indexed, unless you rename each occurrence 
every time through the loop. But I guess that would be the correct Ada 
approach. Seems awfully heavyweight compared to the C approach and what I
sketched.

It's certainly not any more than syntactic sugar, but if I were designing 
my own Ada like language from scratch, would it be worth including 
such a facility? 

-- Brian