Re: Origins of == in C

>The distinction between = and == in C has caused me no end of grief. ...


>[My recollection is that they used = for assignment because it's a lot more
>common than comparison. Besides, it's Fortran-compatible. -John]


The moderators comment is correct. As far as I can remember, someone
somewhere along the line found that the number of assignments in a
typical program far outweighed the number of equality checks. This was
acknowledged by C's designers who reasoned that the single "=" for
assignment would save key strokes over the more typical ":=". I cannot
remember who reached this conlcusion, where it was published or which
of C's designers encouraged its adoption.


However, I think that a more intrinsic problem raised by C's "=" and
"==" is the fact that C grammar treats both as operators in an
expression. If this were not the case and "=" was constrained to use
in a statement, then C compilers could spot a lot of the problems that
you are encountering.


But if this was the case, code like the following wouldn't work:


ptrType* aFunction (void);
ptrType* myVariable = NULL;
...
{
        if (myVariable = aFunction())
                /* ^^^ assignment =>
                  * myVariable is not NULL, so do
                  * something.
                  */
                printf ("Address returned by aFunction() is: %x\n", myVariable);
        else
                printf ("myVariable is NULL!\n");
}


Bye,


-BG
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