Whitespace is your friend

[Eric S. Raymond]

>    Finally, I question why this business of checking for old-fashioned 
> assignment operators is still in Unix C compilers.  After all, V7 came
> out around 10 years ago!  Does anyone really have around any code that hasn't
> been converted to the new syntax by *now*?  

Heh-heh-heh. Naive, ain't he?

I ran across a related gotcha in some old comp.sources.unix code recently. I
got a bunch of "warning: old-style assignment" messages. I sicced my trusty 
gnumacs on 'em with a C-X C-`, only to find myself looking at several instances
of
			card=NOVALUE;

"What", I said, "does it all mean?" Not being entirely thick between the ears,
I looked up at the head of the file. I found

#define NOVALUE	-1

and mentally consigned the hapless geek who'd originated the program to an
eternal hell of three-piece-suits and COBOL coding until I looked at the rest
of it and realized I was ranking on some student's proud first project. He did
OK otherwise; it worked and I still run it occasionally.

As it turns out, the least intrusive fix was to change the #define to (-1).
But the real moral of this story, gentlebeings, is: Whitespace Is Your Friend.
When in doubt, use some!
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
      Email: eric at snark.uu.net                       CompuServe: [72037,2306]
      Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355      Phone: (215)-296-5718