Missed opportunities
Missed opportunities
Posted Jun 11, 2013 15:17 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872)In reply to: Missed opportunities by tjc
Parent article: Little things that matter in language design
The trouble with that approach is the shitload of hard to spot bugs happening when the programmer's idea of how the expression will be interpreted is different from what the Revised Report says (not to mention the places where compiler's idea of how it should be interpreted differs from either). And the rules are appallingly convoluted, exactly because it tries hard to DWIM. With usual nastiness following from that..
C is actually on a sweetspot between A68-level opaque attempt at DWIM (6 kinds of contexts, etc.) and things like BLISS where you have to spell *all* dereferences out - i = j + 1 is spelled i = .j + 1 (and yes, they went and used . for dereference operator, leading to no end of joy when trying to RTFS, especially when it's a lineprinter-produced listing).