code review

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 01 Jul 2012 10:37:05 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:
>> Thomas Jollans <t at jollybox.de> writes:
>>
>>> My sole point, really, is that "normally", one would expect these two
>>> expressions to be equivalent:
>>>
>>> a < b < c
>>> (a < b) < c
>>
>> What norm gives you that expectation? That's not how those operators
>> work in mathematical notation. I know of no programming language that
>> would give a newcomer to Python that expectation. So where is the norm
>> you're referring to?
> 
> C, SQL, REXX, and many other languages.

All the worse for those languages, since they violate the semantics of 
mathematical notation.

The more I learn about C, the less I want to know about C. What sort of 
crazy language designer thought that having

2 == 2 == 2

return 0 (false) was a good idea? At least Pascal gives an error, since 
you can't compare bools with longints, and forces you to write:

(2 = 2) and (2 = 2)

Sheer craziness for C to abuse mathematical notation like that. But what 
is one to expect from a language where

(unsigned)-1 == -1

apparently is true.

http://nitoprograms.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/signed-and-unsigned-
comparisons-in-c-c.html


-- 
Steven