🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bxyut0.Jo@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>                                                        As I understand it,
>*x in C denotes the object referred to by x, the object "found" AT x.

Yes.

>                                                                       Thus,
>@x would have been at least a somewhat logical notation, at least relatively
>easily understood by users, as well as easy for parsing, etc.

But this flies in the face of hundreds of years of consistent usage of
the @ symbol in retail trade, where it implies a multiplication (10
items @ $3 each => $30).  This is precisely the sort of ambiguity I
thought you wanted to avoid :-)

(Is it a coincidence that C uses the same symbol as its multiplication
operator and as its dereference operator ?  Was Brian Kernighan an
accountant in a past life ?  Followups to alt.conspiracy)

It's been suggested that C doesn't use the @ symbol (for anything at
all) because it was the default line-kill character in early versions
of Unix.  I've never managed to square this with the use of the #
character to identify preprocessor directives, since # was the default
character-erase character.  Maybe that's why the # has to be the first
character on a preprocessor directive line.

I seem to recall that PL/M-86 and its descendants use the @ symbol as a
address-of operator, the equivalent of C's unary &; this the exact
opposite of your proposed usage.

Cheers, Mike.

moliver@pyramid.com
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