From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d901a50a5adfec3c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,3893224d5acbca8b X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,9f0bf354542633fd X-Google-Attributes: gid1094ba,public From: aaron.crane@pobox.com (Aaron Crane) Subject: Re: Fortran or Ada? Date: 1998/10/01 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 396798550 References: <907198459snz@genesis.demon.co.uk> Mail-Copies-To: never Organization: The Spanish Inquisition. Well, you didn't expect that, did you? Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c Date: 1998-10-01T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <907198459snz@genesis.demon.co.uk>, fred@genesis.demon.co.uk (Lawrence Kirby) writes: > strcpy(&str[0], &"A string"[0]); > printf(&"The string is '%s'\n"[0], &str[0]); > > It would turn C into a much less readable language (even for people who > thought it was unreadable to start with). Seconded whole-heartedly. I am in the unfortunate position of having some familiarity with a fifteen-year-old project- and platform-specific (but allegedly general-purpose) scripting language called Sop[1]. Sop's principal influence (and implementation language, unsurprisingly) is K&R C. Sop has precisely this misfeature that arrays do not decay into pointers; this in itself is enough to make the code eminently unreadable -- even ignoring the language's other infelicities. -- Aaron Crane [1] Name changed to protect the guilty. I won't rant about Sop here, because AFAIK only about ten people worldwide have ever encountered it; suffice it to say that not only was it designed by someone with no understanding of language design, it wasn't actually designed as a whole in the first place.