----- Original Message -----
From: John Dammeyer <johnd@AUTOARTISANS.COM>
To: <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 7:42 AM
Subject: Re: [OT]:C pointer Question


> Hi,
>
> Before you get too carried away with beating up on K&R you must remember
> the initial target (PDP-10) for the C language.  At that time compilers
> were no where near as sophisticated as they are now and often tight code
> like that translated literally to a few lines of assembler.  Code that
> was more human readable often generated assembler that was much much
> larger.
>
> You see the difference in languages like Pascal.  The compiler creates
> the same instruction for a P := P + 5; as a C compiler does for C += 5;
> And when you think about it, given that assignments were two character
> tokens, the Pascal language should have had P += 5;

You don't think that since C was originally interpreted (and called B) that
this may have had an influence on special efficiency constructs such as +=
and ++ do you?

I really don't know why these are present in C, I'm just speculating.

Regards
Sergio Masci

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