From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Aug 11 16:19: 7 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (earth-nat-cw.backplane.com [208.161.114.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 656A437B405 for ; Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:19:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@earth.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.4/8.11.2) id f7BNJ2020598; Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:19:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:19:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200108112319.f7BNJ2020598@earth.backplane.com> To: John Merryweather Cooper Cc: tlambert2@mindspring.com, Rob , "hackers @ FreeBSD . ORG" Subject: Re: the =+ operator References: <3B73F0BC.548D40B3@home.com> <3B757D14.B344931@mindspring.com> <20010811121857.A41578@johncoop> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG When I was writing DICE I spent a whole 5 seconds considering the merits of the old =-, =+, etc... notation. Because that's all it took for me to come to the obvious conclusion that the old style notation was a pile of crap that only made everyone's lives more difficult - not just the poor sod (that's me) writing the compiler, but also the programmers, reviewers, and testers as well. The whole process of writing and testing code was positively impacted when those old style notations became illegal. And, for the record, the whitespace-ignoring bit has nothing to do with the lexing/parsing issue. Nothing at all whatsoever to do with it. Even in a modern compiler a construct like "+ =" is illegal. Whitespace is not ignored, it was simply clarified. The real problem with the old stuff was always human readability, debuggability, and lack of robustness. And... DICE still has the fastest one-pass lexer/parser on the planet. I just had to throw that in there :-) Too bad it only generates 68000 output. :"Style" is the essense of the best programming. Good programmers have it, :the rest suffer for want of it . . . : :jmc ... Amen. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message