Add NOT, AND, OR to language
| From: | garyb at fxt dot com | Date: | Wed, 19 Jan 2000 06:26:43 +0000 |
| Subject: | Add NOT, AND, OR to language | ||
| Groups: | php.version4 | ||
| Request: | Send a blank email to php-version4+get-9276@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
This may seem silly to all y'al who've been writing C all day, but this
comes from someone who has been dealing with programming newbies who are
graduating from HTML to PHP, and have never seen an 'if' statement before.
They also have trouble with the difference between '=' and '==', but that's
another story.
Some folks have trouble seeing the logical operators in conditional
expressions - '!', '||', and '&&'. They'll eventually
get the hang of it,
but it also would make some bugs harder to miss for the rest of us if the
language also supported NOT, OR, and AND as substitutes.
Nichlaus Wirth would of course encourage support for ::= instead of = as
well, per the ambiguity resulting from allowing conditionals to contain
assignments. :O)
We all know the true story about the US rocket that went up 100 miles and
turned left because of a single typo in a FORTRAN program:
100 DO 110 I=1.100
...
110 CONTINUE
FORTRAN stripped blanks out before parsing. Statement 100 was supposed to
have a comma. With a period, it's an assignment:
"DO100I = 1.100"
Gary B