Old-fashioned assignment operators (was Re: braces

Barry Shein bzs at Encore.COM
Sun Dec 18 04:26:45 AEST 1988


I think Gwyn speaks a little too soon about nuking old interpretations
of =op, an incredibly boring find on both 4.3 and SYSVR3 sources
reveals several instances of =op stubbornly remain (I can't say this
was exhaustive, it was however exhausting):

	all over Pascal in 4.3bsd
	lex/sub1.c (both 4.3 and SysV)
	mkfs (SYSVR3)

Most of these seemed to use a space to dismabiguate and almost
certainly intended V6 semantics as they're utilities that date back to
around then. There might be more but that's enough to make the point.

I agree they could/should be cleaned up but it was a useful exercise
before believing that the compiler's semantics could be safely
changed. (Note: this is in everyone's code derived from either 4.3 or
SYSV so Unix systems which have changed the compiler semantics and not
the code almost certainly have introduced bugs into their systems.)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list