Re: Let's talk about order of assignment

[Tom N Harris <telliamed@...>]

On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 03:34:39 PM Sean Conner wrote:
>   I'm guilty of that.  My POSIX process libary [1] allows:
> 
>         process.limits.hard.core = "20m"
> 
> but behind the scenes it turns that into a call to setrlimit().  I find
> "assigning" the values more intuitive than knowing how to call the
> setrlimit() function.  Conversely, reading process.limits.hard.core in turn
> calls getrlimit().

I was perhaps overly strict in my criticism. The call to setrlimit is sensible 
as it is a different way of assigning a known value (20 megabytes... except 
the lower-case 'm' irks me very slightly) to a known something-like-an-lvalue, 
which is a value in the kernel.

The confusion I was thinking of is where an assignment statement does 
something that is not in any way like an assignment. For example, I wouldn't 
be comfortable using a HTTP library like this:

    local connection = http.new()
    connection.get = "http://www.lua.org/"; -- send a request
    html.parse(connection.get) -- read result

-- 
tom <telliamed@whoopdedo.org>