ambiguous ?

[David desJardins]

>From article <11388 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, by gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn):
> The mathematical formalisms to which you allude do not deal with
> side effects, which is the only thing that makes evaluation order
> an issue.

   I don't agree with this.  Efficiency can also be a major issue.  It
makes sense to say that you want one expression evaluated first if you
expect that the second one is more expensive to evaluate and/or less
likely to be needed.  (This is obviously something that an optimizer
may not be able to determine.)  This feature is one of the annoying
things which FORTRAN is missing.

   -- David desJardins