YANO (Yet Another New Operator)

[Frank A. Adrian]

Yes, I know the purists don't want their langauge munged around,
but having been working on a program that uses several arrays of
linked lists, I was wondering about:

	(A very long computataion which gets you to a pointer) ->= next;

which of course is equivalent to

	(A...) = (A...)->next;

Of course, this would be checked by lint (or some of the newer cc's)
to make sure you are assiging a pointer field to the same type of
pointer.  With this construct, a nice list search could be written
as:
		for(x = foo; x && (x->key != key); x ->= next);
		/*           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I know, non-portable, but it
										  works for me                 */
		return x;

I know this is probably unnecessary for efficiency, as most optimizing
compilers will put the left hand side in a register, but it does increase
clarity in some cases, such as:

	a[x++] = a[x]->next; or a[x] = a[x++]->next;

I have trouble remembering in what order the increment takes
place. Is it before or after the assignment (No fair peeking in K&R!)?
The semantics of

	a[x++] ->= next;

is clear -- the increment takes place after the asignment.  

In any case, I don't think that this would mung up the language
too bad, and comments about how tough it is to add "features" to
compilers don't bother me at all (I don't have to write them, I
just have to use them).

				Frank Adrian
				The opinions expressed here are
				in no way reflect those of ANY
				sane person or organization.