Re: Declaration design preference: type or name first

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:27:23 +0100, Torben Ægidius Mogensen wrote:

> What I mostly object to is putting part of the type before the name and
> other parts after the name, such as "int x[10]".  This makes it very
> hard to read the type of a name.  Is is better with "int[10] x" or "x :
> int[10]".  C-style type syntax gets even worse if we have functional
> parameter types, such as "int g(int f(int x[10]))".  Note that to
> specify a type for the functional parameter f, we have to invent a dummy
> name for its parameter -- a name that isn't really part of the type.  It
> is much better with a postfix syntax like "g(f : int[10]->10) : int" or
> a prefix syntax like "int g(int[10]->10 f)".  It is even worse if we in
> C-style type syntax have to declare a function that returns a function. 
> This would be something like
> 
> int f(int x[10]) g(int x)
> 
> I'm not sure this is valid C syntax, and it certainly isn't easy to
> read.  Isn't it better to write something like
> 
> g(x : int) : int[10]->int

C doesn't allow a function to be returned, so returning a pointer to a
function instead, the correct declaration here is

int (*g(int x))(int x[10]);

More typically, you'd use a typedef to avoid blowing up people's brains.

typedef int F(int x[10]);
F *g(int x);

Cforall (http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~cforall/
seems to be down right now)
chooses to allow all types in front of names, so this might be written

int (* ([10] int)) g(int x);