Re:The Idea of Lisp
by kazinator on Friday December 16, 2016 @01:44PM
(#13195608)
In GNU C, you can use a brace-enclosed statement block as an expression.
Funny story; years before I became a C programmer, and at a time when I didn't yet study ISO C properly, I discovered and used this extension naturally.
I wanted to evaluate some statements where only an expression could be used so I thought, gee, come on, can't you just put parens around it to turn it into an expression and get the value of the last expression as a return value? I tried that and it worked. And of course, if it works it's good (standards? what are those?)
Then I tried using the code with a different C compiler; oops!
Anyway, this GNU C feature doesn't have as much of an impact as you might think.
Funny story; years before I became a C programmer, and at a time when I didn't yet study ISO C properly, I discovered and used this extension naturally.
I wanted to evaluate some statements where only an expression could be used so I thought, gee, come on, can't you just put parens around it to turn it into an expression and get the value of the last expression as a return value? I tried that and it worked. And of course, if it works it's good (standards? what are those?)
Then I tried using the code with a different C compiler; oops!
Anyway, this GNU C feature doesn't have as much of an impact as you might think.