meaning of continue (WAS: Some interesting novice questions [...

[Chris Torek]

In article <6ecTR1w161w at phoenix.com> stanley at phoenix.com (John Stanley)
writes a rather vitriolic message, including the following:
>Who is H&S?

H is Samuel Harbison, and S is Guy L. Steele Jr.  Both of them are quite
intelligent fellows.

>They wrote C?

They worked together (at Tartan Labs) on a real C compiler, and in the
process discovered that there was no such thing as `the real C language'
---that there were a number of different, and sometimes incompatible,
dialects.  So they set out to document exactly what could and could not
be relied upon.

If you are working with a C system that predates ANSI X3.159-1989, the
book that resulted is the best reference you can buy.  (Note that K&R
1st ed. is not intended as a reference work.  Neither is K&R 2, for
that matter, but it is for ANSI C, not pre-ANSI C.)

Also:
>I thought the purpose of coding was to get a MACHINE to do the right thing.

Actually, no.  This is only a part of the task, though usually a large
part.  It is also important to make the result understandable: to the
people and/or machines that will use it; to the people and/or software
that will maintain it; and so on.

As to the main point of the message (which I will not quote further), I
will say only this:  Anthropomorphism is a form of analogy, and analogy
is a very powerful tool for analysis, but also a dangerous one.  It is
right to be wary of analogies, but it is not right to reject them out
of hand simply because they *are* analogies.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 405 2750)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris