C's syntax (was Re: Python Formatted C Converter (PfCC))

[William Tanksley]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 20:42:24 +0100, Grant Griffin wrote:
>Alex Martelli wrote:

>> But that doesn't mean I have to keep silent when somebody
>> baldly asserts that C's syntax is "pretty good".  Yecch.  It's
>> most definitely *NOT*!

>Just for curiosity, could you be a little more specific here?  Sure, C
>has its several known pitfalls.  But those aside, what's so bad about
>it's syntax overall?

The pitfalls, for one ;-).  C also makes pointers look terrible.

I don't mind the syntax, myself; the hard part for me is how incredibly
poorly designed the standard library is.  A good library is able to catch
mistakes; C's library usually 'detects' errors by corrupting memory and
dying later.

In fact, there's a type of testing in which all external interfaces are
given semi-random parameters (chosen based on boundary conditions).  The
goal is to get 100% detection of the bad parameters (it's okay to crash
immediately).  C's library, when thus tested, detected almost none of the
misuse.  It's a design flaw, not something a compiler can easily fix.

>Having written a lot of Pascal right before I learned C, I found C's
>syntax to be quite a relief.  Isn't nice to type "{" rather than
>"begin"?  (Or, better yet, to type nothing at all in Python?  <wink>) 

True.  That's rather a minor quibble, though -- it's even better to type
just 'end', or nothing at all.  It's BAD to get confused about whether a
given statement is part of an IF (the distinction between blocks and
statements following ifs), or to have a syntax in which it's easy to not
notice that there's a semicolon at the end of the for loop, making it
empty and making the block after it execute exactly once when the for loop
completes.

>And isn't it nice that the properties of a C "for" loop are very
>simply--and flexibly--defined?--no arbitrary restrictions here.

Agreed.

>And why did Pascal ever need that bogus ":=" thing in the first place?

Well...

><<designed by a guy who didn't use it much>>  Oh, and the C preprocessor
>is a beautiful thing whose absence, in retrospect, makes Pascal seem
>absolutely incomplete.

Ugh.  I HATE the C preprocessor.  Wouldn't it be beautiful to be able to
parse the language using the language's own capabilities?  Or at least to
be able to have some limited parsing and computation at compile-time?

Once you play with Forth, you're pretty much ruined for any other
language...  Even Lisp just doesn't cut it.

>Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley