🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <23663@alice.att.com> bs@alice.att.com (Bjarne Stroustrup) writes:
>How frequent is a**p anyway? (has anyone got any data?)

I always avoid ** when I mean a mixture of multiplication and dereference
(in C).  I use parentheses to make it clear what is dereference and what
is multiplication.  Thus I would always write:  a * (*p)

Or, in the case of a***p, I would write:  a * (**p)

There are two situations where I might have generated a**p accidentally:

1.  #define THE_VALUE *p  /* This is C code.  Should be (*p) anyway */

    a*THE_VALUE

2.  a*i
    global change of i to *p


Case 1 should not show up in C++ code and is poor style in C code
because of the missing parentheses in the #define.

Case 2 should be a global change to (*p) anyway because of the
danger of a/i being changed to a/*p  (comment!)

So no, I do not intentionally generate code of the problem form.
I have seen such code, but only in code that I consider a nightmare
to read and maintain anyway.  Keep in mind also that I know of the
"global change results in comment" problem, so that means there must
be some a**p code around here generated that way.

Stuart
--
: Stuart MacMartin                                    email: sjm@bnr.ca      :
: Bell-Northern Research                              phone: (613) 763-5625  :
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