On Friday, 29 January 1999 at 10:27:00 +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote: > On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 00:55:21 EST, Mikhail Teterin wrote: >> Everybody's goal is to keep/make code readable (accusations of "trying >> to obfuscate" are silly). You, people, are just not agreeing what >> "readable" means. Hoping to aid in the ending of this thread(s), > > Thank you very much. This is _exactly_ the point here. > > As far as I see it, there are a lot of people who are saying > > "I want to use parens to improve readability" > > when what they really mean is > > "I want to use parens to obviate the need to learn operator precedence."
I suppose that depends on whether you consider the code write-only or read-write. > I can't imagine how unnecessary parens are going to improve > "readability" for anyone who knows his/her operator precedence. What about the others? > What it does is allow folks who aren't sure about what they're doing > to get around doing things properly. Remember, we're not talking about the writer now, we're talking about the reader, who in the general case is not the same person. To quote ``Design and implementation'': Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much. Adding the occasional superfluous brace or paren pair can help a lot there. And if superfluous parens are so bad, explain why the kernel is full of things like: return (error); Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger g...@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
