The Ada-style "_" spacer in numbers (for hex and decimal as well as bin) would be a huge improvement to readability for longer strings. It should also appeal to the "hosted" folk as well as the "non-hosted" folk, so perhaps Walter might have some luck suggesting it to the powers that be in the C world.
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Ignacio G.T.
I was used to PL/M's "$" null separator, which let me write
VALUE = 0100$1100B;
or something like that. This was circa 1988. When I switched to C, I was surprised to see no "B" nor "$" equivalent forms. I agree, though, that Ada's "_" is far superior.
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Walter Banks
I like the spacer syntax. There is at least one C compiler that supports spacers (not ours) I don't think that spacer syntax is likely to be introduced into C anytime soon. C has never had it and there are some things that need to be resolved long before this becomes a pressing issue.
In our case we added 0B... , 0b.... with the same syntax as hex support. I recognize the argument for hex support only and legacy support for octal notation. My customers are almost all non-hosted embedded systems folks and we have supported their needs with the extension.
Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited
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Everett M. Greene
I would think the spacer idea could be adopted faily readily since it's upward (forward?) compatible and is nearly trivial to implement.
Now, for a real miracle, get them to revise some of the string functions to return something useful. Who has any need for the first arg to strcpy() as the return value?
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Jonathan Kirwan
Slow imagination? This popped immediately to mind (I'm sure a compiler writer will provide better.) Consider the ?: syntax for a moment and how it _might_ be used.
Jon
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JeffR
of:
In my opinion, the interesting downside of mnemonics is that you have t get it right twice; right with the definition of the mnemonic (in your . file or wherever), and right in its usage. Also, it isn't as clear whe you read the code. I'd rather see a hex literal than a mnemonic; at leas I can directly reference the register bit settings from a hardware devic data sheet rather than finding the mnemonic definition in a .H file, the doing the reference.
Jeff
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