learning C (was: Re: ambiguous ?)

[Jim Giles]

>From article <2523 at munnari.oz.au>, by ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe):
> Well, that depends.  To start with, temporary variables have the great
> merit of being a familiar means.  That's how you force argument
> evaluation order in Algol 60, Pascal, Ada, Fortran (66, 77, 8X), Modula,
> Lisp, Simula 67, ... 

Most of those languages also have _other_ means of forcing evaluation
order in useful contexts.  For example, all of the above mentioned 
languages allow the user to prohibit optimization of expressions
involving associative operators - using parenthesis.  The C argument
that parenthesis should be used _only_ for legibility always seemed
rather silly (especially in a language which otherwise makes so few
concessions for legibility).