From 6965045045196550981 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,9a6b7da9ba54eaea X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: f78e5,9a6b7da9ba54eaea X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-07-06 12:05:59 PST Xref: gmd.de comp.lang.c++:25873 comp.std.c++:2978 Path: gmd.de!xlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!agate!matt From: matt@physics2.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: C++ Language Extensions Date: 6 Jul 93 12:00:27 Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Theoretical Physics Group) Lines: 25 Message-ID: References: <25697@alice.att.com> <25699@alice.att.com> <20evjs$b77@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <1993Jun27.155845.28679@ucc.su.OZ.AU> Reply-To: matt@physics.berkeley.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: physics2.berkeley.edu In-reply-to: kanze@us-es.sel.de's message of 5 Jul 93 14:46:59 In article kanze@us-es.sel.de (James Kanze) writes: [referring to a proposed exponentiation operator for C++] > In sum, the committee has decided to do the hard part (handling the > difficulties in definition, which will be necessary for the library > function too), and forgo the easy part (extending the syntax). The hard part, and also the important part. There were two reasons why I wanted an exponentiation operator: to provide more convenient syntax, and to provide a good method for raising numbers to small integral powers. (I *do* hope that none of you write pow(x,2) when you want to square x... I've seen code that does this.) The convenient syntax would have been nice, but overloading pow() for the case where the second argument is integral will at least remove a rather large deficiency in the language. I'm glad that the Committee approved of the idea of making this addition to the Standard Library. I hope that this does happen when the time actually comes to make the Standard Library standard, and that compiler vendors will start including pow(double,int) in their libraries some time soon. I'm getting tired of writing "inline double square(double x) {return x*x;}". -- Matthew Austern Maybe we can eventually make language a matt@physics.berkeley.edu complete impediment to understanding.