Semi-colonic Irritation

Msg#4268 - Semi-colonic Irritation

Posted: 3/3/2004 by Duncan
Modified: 3/3/2004 by Duncan

Some years ago I coined the term "semi-colonic irritation" in an e-mail thread about a simple optimisation UserTalk programmers could use in their UserTalk coding in Frontier.

Needless to say, some novice C programmers I've taught over the years often fall into the trap of ending a #define with a semi-colon as in:

#define FALSE 0;

And then use something like

if (result == FALSE)...

which of course causes the compiler to throw up an error along the lines of "If statement missing )".

I was quite surprised that a Google Search: semi-colonic irritation yields no hits since, IMHO, it's such a nice play on words ;-) No doubt Google will index this post in the not too distant future and there'll be at least one hit for the phrase.

Enclosures:
None.

Replies:

RE: Semi-colonic Irritation ( 3/4/2004 by ibroadfo, Label: None. )

Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss), a book about punctuation, mentions