Re: Whaddaya think?

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

On 17.06.2024 16:41, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

DFS <nospam@dfs.com> writes:

Moving forward, return 0 it is.

 
By the way, you might have retained return (exp); from old C.  C
originally required the parentheses, but they got dropped quite early
on.  The syntax in K&R (1st edition) does not require them, but almost
all the code example in the book still have them!

>
This is an interesting observation! (That I can confirm.)
>
That's probably why originally I also used parenthesis.
I saw the examples but didn't inspect the syntax appendix.
>
But how did the early compiler behave?
Did they follow the code samples' syntax or the formal syntax?

The syntax in the 1975 C reference manual required parentheses as part
of the syntax of a return statement:
    return ;
    return ( expression ) ;
By 1978, when K&R1 was published, the syntax had changed to:
    return ;
    return expression ;

If you write `return (42);`, even in modern C, it's still syntactically
valid.  The parentheses are simply part of the expression, not part of
the syntax of the return statement.

I took a while to drop them as I came to C from B where they were always
required so I'd got the habit.

>
I dropped them as soon as I noticed that it's possible.

My personal preference (which I don't follow entirely consistently) is
to try to avoid making things that aren't function calls look too much
like function calls.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */