make (a < b < c) illegal?
Walter Bright
newshound at digitalmars.com
Wed Feb 7 16:55:15 PST 2007
Right now, in D (as well as C and C++), when you see the expression:
if (a < b < c)
what is your first thought? Mine is that it was written by a newbie who
didn't realize that (a < b) returns true or false, and that it does NOT
mean ((a < b) && (b < c)). The odds approach certainty that this is a
logic error in the code, and even if it was intentional, it raises such
a red flag that it shouldn't be used anyway.
Andrei has proposed (and I agreed) that this should be done away with in
the language, i.e. comparison operators should no longer be associative.
It's a simple change to the grammar. If one really did want to write
such code, it could be done with parentheses:
if ((a < b) < c)
to get the original behavior. At least, that looks intentional.
I don't think this will break existing code that isn't already broken.
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