At 10:01 AM 8/18/00 +0200, Jörg Stiller wrote:
>(2) to most people it is clear that the introduction of ^ for
> exponentiation would improve the readability of Fortran,
> whithout adding new functionality, nor new problems
That sure isn't clear to me. If I see A**B in source code, I am confident
it means exponentiation. If I see A^B, I have to stop and ask myself
whether this is an exponentiation, or a bitwise exclusive-or, or something
else someone thought was mnemonic. (E.g., ^ looks a lot like the operator
we used for AND when I studied Boolean algebra.) When the graphic for ^
was up-arrow rather than caret, it was reasonably mnemonic to use it for an
exponentiation operator, but now that it _is_ caret, that mnemonic
connection is (in my opinion) weak.
-Kurt
--
Kurt W Hirchert [log in to unmask]
UIUC Department of Atmospheric Sciences +1-217-265-0327
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