C/the.ansi.c.programming.language/notes.accompany.ansi.c/sx4i.html

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   9 <title>section 1.5.4: Word Counting</title>
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  15 <H2>section 1.5.4: Word Counting</H2>
  16
  17 page 21
  18 <p>Deep sentence:
  19 <blockquote>In a program as tiny as this,
  20 it makes little difference,
  21 but in larger programs,
  22 the increase in clarity is well worth the modest extra effort
  23 to write it this way from the beginning.
  24 </blockquote>I agree with this.
  25 Some people complain that symbolic constants make a program
  26 harder to read,
  27 because you always have to look them up to see what they mean.
  28 As long as you choose appropriate names for symbolic
  29 constants and use them consistently
  30 (i.e. even if APPLE and ORANGE happen to have the same value,
  31 don't use one when you mean the other),
  32 no one will have this complaint about your programs.
  33 </p>
  34 <p>Note that there's no direct way to simplify
  35 the condition
  36 <pre>   if (c == ' ' || c == '\n' || c == '\t')
  37 </pre>In particular, something like
  38 <pre>   if (c == (' ' || '\n' || '\t'))
  39 </pre>would <em>not</em> work.
  40 (What would it do?)
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  50 This page by <a href="http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/">Steve Summit</a>
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