On Sat, 29 Aug 1998, David Ross wrote:
> From the K&R C book I understand that the language syntax was
> intentionally kept
> small to avoid "scope creep" that would lead to LANGUAGE bloat (e.g. P/L 1).
> Language design like the rest of life is filled with trade-offs.
>
> Your prefered syntax is clearer and consistent with close corresondence or at
> least access to the underlying machine architecture, another of C's design
> goals. I have always found bit twiddling cumbersum at best. We can only
> assume
> that hex and octal representation provided the access and/or that literal bit
> strings were "deprecated" and "counter-revolutionary" in the late sixties and
> early seventies.
>
Well, just adding another base (and a power 2 base, at that) doesn't look
like that much of a feature bloat.
I mean, yeah, right, octal and hexadecimal but no binary?
Doesn't that look like K&R cared only for 2 machines (one with 9 bit words
and another with 8 bit words)...
Anyway, I though about implementing a preprocessor for C that would
convert 0b numbers to hexadecimal numbers, but never got around to it.
--
Moshe Zadka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | (\_/)
What's Yellow and Complete?A Bananach Space|( =(^Y^)=
Being smart means being able to count to 20| \_(m___m)
without taking off your shoes - Micky Mouse|(originally by jgs)
