[postgis-users] 1.3.3 Pre-Release Notice

[Chris Hermansen]

You guys!!!

Everyone knows that all of these issues were sorted out in the Algol68
report, where semi-colons were chosen as indicating activities that must
take place in sequential fashion, and commas were chosen as indicating
activities that could happen in a random order.

So

A := 38; B := A

was guaranteed to evaluate correctly, whereas

A := 38, B := A

might not since it could be that the value to which A refrers at the
time of the second assignment statement is undefined.

A lot of these ideas made their way into C eventually, including the
idea that the order of evaluation of expressions in a comma-delineated
list was undefined.

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> My intuition that it worked left-to-right came from Perl... where'd
> your reverse intuition come from, Mark? (Languages are so
> multifarious...)
>
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland
> <mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>>  Fascinating. Being self-taught in C, it's always interesting to learn
>>  something new - even if it does go against intuition :)
>>     
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>   


-- 
Regards,

Chris Hermansen         mailto:chris.hermansen at timberline.ca
tel+1.604.714.2878 · fax+1.604.733.0631 · mob+1.778.232.0644
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