Old-fashioned assignment operators (was Re: braces

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Sun Dec 18 09:01:59 AEST 1988


>I think Gwyn speaks a little too soon about nuking old interpretations
>of =op, an incredibly boring find on both 4.3 and SYSVR3 sources
>reveals several instances of =op stubbornly remain (I can't say this
>was exhaustive, it was however exhausting):
>
>	all over Pascal in 4.3bsd

Well, yeah, Berkeley hasn't (yet - at least not as of 4.3) nuked it. 
Sun *has*, however, nuked it in SunOS4.0, so I presume the equivalent
code has long since been fixed in the Sun Pascal compiler.  I suspect
Berkeley will nuke it at some point (if they haven't already done so in
4.3-tahoe).

>	lex/sub1.c (both 4.3 and SysV)

That's inside debugging code; presumably, if somebody ever turns it on,
they'll have to fix it....

>	mkfs (SYSVR3)

That's inside the "#ifdef RT" stuff; I don't know how vigorously UNIX/RT
is being supported, but that code doesn't get compiled under regular UNIX.

>I agree they could/should be cleaned up but it was a useful exercise
>before believing that the compiler's semantics could be safely
>changed. (Note: this is in everyone's code derived from either 4.3 or
>SYSV so Unix systems which have changed the compiler semantics and not
>the code almost certainly have introduced bugs into their systems.)

Well, S5 ("Release 1", I think) *did* change the compiler semantics;
since the code in question either doesn't appear in S5 (Pascal) or
doesn't get compiled in S5 ("lex", "mkfs"), they definitely didn't
introduce bugs into their systems.



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