About your example, it would also be my expectation that a C implementation of
int bar = (7 > 3) ; would set bar equal to +1, since 7 is indeed greater than 3. My favorite language is assembly language, but it is true that I among statement-level languages I strongly prefer Pl/I to C. C is, in my view, a flawed toy programming language that now suffers grievously from hypertrophy. (It is also correct, as you conjectured, that the low and high bounds of a PL/I array were classically limited only by the inequality -2^31 <= L <= H <= +2^31 - 1, -2147483648 <= L <= H <= +2147483647.) That said, and given the absence of a logical data type in C, the convention of returning -1 as a surrogate for the outcome false is appropriate if ugly. It is, however, appropriate to distinguish between an outcome and a return code in many, indeed most contexts, i.e., to avoid confounding the true|false dichotomy with the success|fsailure dichotomy. If a C function conducts a search for, say, an element of a character array that has the valuew '?' and does not find one, returning -1 to indicate this is in C appropriate. If instead a C function attempts to open a file and does not succeed in doing so, returning -1 as an indicator that it failed is not in my view enough. In this case I would wish to have some further diagnostic information. Opinions about such issues do differ; these differences are often as much visceral as intellectual; and it is my guess that we shall never agree about this and much else. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
