3 ms·
That seems a little backwards and barbaric, though right? Imagine if we had to watch out for this as a common pitfall: // BUG! Actually subtracts x from c
by kdmccormick 3y ago
That seems a little backwards and barbaric, though right?
Imagine if we had to watch out for this as a common pitfall:
// BUG! Actually subtracts x from current val of neg_x.
neg_x = -x;
Even moreso, how would these two lines behave? Would they differ in semantics?
n = -5
n =- 5
Overall, -= is just so much less ambiguous.
EDIT: To your point about ->, I personally think C would be better if:
*p->next
parsed as:
(*p)->next
instead of:
*(p->next)
but maybe now I'm not thinking through all the parsing impliciations :)
- zeusk 3y agoAs you note in your edit; we already have to watch for that pitfall :) so really the best way out is to be as verbose as possible imo; a = a + c or auto nodep = *nodepp; nodep->next; Compilers and compute performance have grown to make the difference negligible for code output and compilation times but they definitely take a lot of mental complexity out of such scenarios (anything helps when grokking 10k+ lines of code).
- tom_ 3y agoI've found struct fields that are pointers far more common than pointers to pointers to structs, so if nothing else it feels like *(p->target) is a more widely useful interpretation of *p->target than (*p)->target would be. Regarding "n = -5", it would presumably be interpreted as "n=(-5)", same as today. Operators don't have spaces in them. So "n- -5" is "n-(-5)", rather than "n--5" (not valid).