Re: language design tradeoffs

raveling@Unify.com (Paul Raveling) writes:
[sick macro trap in C deleted]


>then the extra ';' terminates the entire 'if' statement and the following
>'else' produces a syntax error. Or if you had left yourself open to the
>dangling else problem in nested if's, it's possible to get no syntax error
>but instead to get a surprising flow of control.


Sigh. The problem is not the ';', it's the syntax of the if statement. If
';' were nothing more than a statement separator and the empty statement
were allowed, we could write ';;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;' if we felt like it. Then
'if' must be terminated with a nice 'fi'and the problem goes away. Another
reason why explicit terminators like od and fi are a good idea!
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Debora Weber-Wulff dww@inf.fu-berlin.de
Institut fuer Informatik +49 30 89691 124
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