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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

"[const const {star}], [const {star} const]"

This is the reason why I hope I never program in C++ again: you can't learn it (or re-learn it) by inspection.

Yeah, I suppose your example has something to do with the spiral rule (it's been many years), which comes from C (and C has its excuses). But if you come at that cold, it's impossible to reason it out.

No language is entirely learnable by inspection, it's a scale, and C++ is way on the wrong end.

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Waaa, programming is hard, waaa, I don't want to worry about const correctness of pointers, waaa I don't want to know what pointer is at all, waaaaaa let me keep making my HTML programs in Visual Clojure BASIC.

The particular example of the language could have been done with distinct words, not a single overloaded word that depends on order of placement. More decorator-like, for example.

int * - pointer to int.

int const * - pointer to const int.

int * const - const pointer to int.

int const * const - const pointer to const int.

I'm not sure what type of grammar could have been used to make this easier. Nobody said that indirection is easy, but indirection IS essential.

Everything on the right of the dash in your example, or something like it.

If you have to use other words to describe what something is, why not use the other words in the first place?

All he did was reverse the order of the types. Right-to-left parsing really isn't that complicated, and mimicking English grammar is not as good an idea as you think it is.

COBOL++, hey it still has a C in it.

ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL

(well to be fair, 'add 1 to cobol' should be enough)

Because it requires too much typing, especially for something you use all the time. Seriously, the syntax is not that difficult to understand and remember.

Your username really suits your childish attitude.

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