Orphaned Response

[karl at haddock]

desint!geoff (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
>While all of this discussion is very interesting and is important to
>achieving a precise language definition, let us not forget that there
>is *no* reason to ever write this particular expression.

I already mentioned one: "(e1?e2:e3),e4".  For another, the types might be
unknown, if they are arguments in a macro; in this case I would want the
macro to work on void as well as valued expressions.

>[If-else] is better style anyway;  it makes use of a construct that
>people are much more used to, and it makes it clearer [what you are doing].

I won't argue that; though style is less important when you're writing a
macro.  Btw, I've been hacking at tail.c recently, and noticed that it has
an expression statement of the form "flag ? f1() : f2()", where f1() and
f2() are functions returning no value.  The compiler accepted it, because
they were (implicitly) declared int rather than void.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!ima!haddock!karl), The Walking Lint