🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4797ni$avq@news0.rain.rg.net>, Paul Long <plong@perf.com> writes: 
<snip>
|> >Next question is why they require parentheses...
|> 
|> I see what you mean--switch doesn't really need parentheses.
|> (That is, if we keep the case keyword. For example,
|> "switch 5+2 case -3:..." is okay, whereas "switch 5+2 -3:..."
|> is ambiguous.) Maybe it was done to make it look like the
|> other control statements, which need parentheses (for example,
|> "if a + 3;" would be ambiguous). I'll bet that's it.

Isn't `switch (5) - 3;' perfectly valid though useless (i.e. has
the same effect as the null statement) statement? I think the
grammar becomes ambiguous the moment `statement' is allowed to follow
`expression' without any delimiter.

<snip>
|> This is off-topic (not Standard-C related), but why do most
|> programmers use parentheses around the value in a return
|> statement? They are absolutely not needed, and I think it looks a
|> lot cleaner without them. A colleague of mine said that she

Wasn't it needed in some early versions of C? Maybe it is a frozen piece of
history.

Cheers
Tanmoy
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