🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bxv2t2.4FH@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
|> [... examples of obfuscating syntax including `|' for boolean OR,
|>      '*' for dereferencing, end `;' for statement termination ...]

I'm disappointed with Dr. Rubin.  He left out such obvious ones as:
making a leading zero digit mean octal!  Or, the fact that `/*' is
actually *ambiguous* in C because it's either a comment or a divide
followed by a dereference (C resolves this by simply filtering out
comments in the preprocessor phase without warning that something
unintended may have happened).  He left out that unsigned integers
are considered to be a *promotion* over signed integers the same size:
they aren't, but C treats them as such.  He left out that the keyword 
"static" means "private" one place and "static allocation" elsewhere.
He left out that there are 50+ operators and 15 levels of precedence.
Or, that the precedences of the operators were selected based on their
algebraic form not their semantic content (for example, it would be more
natural to have unary minus with the same precedence as subtraction).
He didn't mention that the distinction between bit-wise and logical
operators would not have been necessary if C had a LOGICAL data type.

Etc....

-- 
J. Giles