🚀 go-pugleaf

dorner@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>[....]
>typedef struct
>    {
>	union {
>	    int coords[4];
>	    Point funnies[2];
>	} r_un;
>    } Rect ;
>#define top		r_un.coords[0]
>#define left		r_un.coords[1]
>#define bottom		r_un.coords[2]
>#define right		r_un.coords[3]
>#define topLeft	r_un.funnies[0]
>#define botRight	r_un.funnies[1]
>
>This would have worked fine, and allowed me to say r.topLeft.

It would also have caused my code that says
	int top, left, bottom, right;
to break in bizarre ways that would have been even more difficult to find
than the r.topLeft problem was (for me, at least).  Granted,
	Point	topLeft;
breaks anyway, but if I'm a representative coder then that rarely
comes up.

>Perhaps (I'm not well versed (yet) in the ins and outs of Macintosh
>programming) there are reasons that this was not done.  But to chalk it
>up to a deficiency in C is not correct.

It's not a deficiency in C, but it is a situation where C's syntax is
different from Pascal.  Since the definitions are specified in Pascal,
then C programming on the Mac is arguably less well documented than is
Pascal programming, and this is a deficiency of the C environment.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver Steele				  ...!{decvax,ihnp4}!mcnc!unc!steele
							steele%unc@mcnc.org

	"Life isn't fair.  It's just fairer than death, that's all."
							-- William Goldman
							  _The Princess Bride_