Re: C like op= proposal

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

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Robert Dewar wrote:
> The pseudo-variable proposal seems entirely horrible to me, and
> indeed was not discussed at all. I can see all kinds of abuse
> and very little gain from this syntactic vinegar :-)

ROTFL!

That little expression (syntactic vinegar) was the high point of a bland
day. Is that an original Dewarism?

> The idea of the evaluation of the right hand side being tied
> in semantically to the evaluation of the left hand side like
> this seems quite nasty to me, a real confusion in the
> fundamental semantics of assignment. Right now the semantics
> attributes of assignment are purely inherited, and you really
> want to keep things this way.
> 
> Maybe I missed something, but I did not see any significant
> support for this particular notion, the discussion was almost
> all about the much cleaner (though still fraught with
> problems)+= type notation.
> 
> I consider a renaming to be much cleaner for a reader than
> the use of your pseudo-variable (the latter is just syntactic
> sugar/vinegar for the former presumably???)

You presume correctly. I haven't seen the original language which did 
this, Mode, since I think most of the docs are in Finnish. I saw this 
idea described in Markku Sakkinen's C++ critique, and I thought it was 
a neat idea. Some people like things like this, some don't. Obviously, 
I'm not so dense that I find I = I + 1 and the like to be a problem, 
but for complex array operations like the example Gautier presented and 
other such things, I find this notation much easier reading than renaming. 
If there are nasty semantics issues, and great potential for misuse, 
that's another issue. 

I wonder if C and C++ programmers find this stuff more readable? I'm 
certainly in that category myself, meaning that I write C and C++ code 
(and enjoy it!) even though in those cases that I use C I would 
generally prefer Ada given the choice. 

A more general point about "readability" is that its a pretty vague
notion, and I sometimes find Ada's verbosity a detriment to readability.

-- Brian