Dimensionality of program code

[Stewart Gordon]

On 18/01/2013 23:17, Era Scarecrow wrote:
<snip>
>   For compatibility it does. Functions called without prototypes (even
> if they are later in the same file) default to return type int too. I
> can't think of any compilers that make it an error (although they should)

I guess the reason they don't is that such a compiler wouldn't be 
following the C standard.

But it would be nice if we had a subset of C that omits such barbarisms 
as this, and compilers for this subset.  For that matter, would the 
intersection of C and C++ reasonably qualify as such?

>> But Dennis could have easily designed it to use a newline instead of a
>> semicolon.  Indeed, there are a number of programming languages that
>> basically do this.
>
>   Maybe, but if you use a newline instead of a semi-colon, then you
> can't put multiple statements on the same line;

A newline as an alternative to a semicolon then.

> newlines and spaces are
> more formatting so they were likely rejected as part of the separator;

Not sure what you mean by that....

> That and if you write a very long statement line (several requirements
> in an if statement) not being able to break it up would make for very
> very ugly code.
<snip>

Then invent a line-splicing notation.  It's what Visual Basic has done.

Stewart.