Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 18:07:55 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: "A.Appleyard" <A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk>
cc: DJGPP AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Spelling
In-Reply-To: <2B00280A72@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.960905180736.1123A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, A.Appleyard wrote:

>   C and C++ find a use for all but two of the printing ascii characters; but `
> and @ are left out in the cold. What I would use them for in C and C++ if I
> could, would be:-
>   x`n as x to the power of n, since ^ already means `nonequivalence'. C/C++ is
> the only language that I know of (except assembly language compilers, and one
> primitive compiler (Elliott Autocode) for an ancient very small mainframe),
> that has the grossly inconvenient misfeature of having no power operator! The
> function pow(x,n) isn't the same, as its calls with a small integer constant
> exponent can't be optimized at compile time anything like as easily.
>   If p is a pointer type (say here, an int*), n AT p as "the array of n int's
> starting at *p". m AT n@p could define an array int[m][n] starting at *p.

Pascal also doesnt have an exponentiation operator AFAIK.