

Ask HN: Does anyone else use "and" and "or" in C (iso646.h)? - benhoyt

Just trying to settle a friendly "coding style" debate I'm having with some colleagues. :-)<p>They're keen on using the spelled-out "and" and "or" as per iso646.h in our code, rather than the standard &#38;&#38; and || operators. Admittedly they do look nice, and match well with our Python code. But it's weird to see them in C, and I've never seen them anywhere else on The Internet.<p>(If you've never seen "and" and "or" used in C, you can read about them and iso646.h here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso646.h)<p>So I'm just curious: Does anyone else use them? Either yourself or in an open-source project you've seen?
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unwind
Wow ... I consider myself reasonably well-versed with C, and I had never heard
of that header.

I would of course, bias and all, consider any programmers deciding to use it
to be well out of touch with reality.

I don't see a real-world benefit either, all it does is make those guys feel
macho and elite for knowing something (of little value, in my opinion), _and_
making the code hugely harder to maintain.

Ask a manager, while providing some kind of statistical data showing how
common use of this header is in C code "in the wild".

A quick search with code.google.com gives _0_ hits for "iso646.h", that tells
me something.

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lhorie
I'd think using those forms would be analogous to using different variable
naming conventions in the same codebase or having no conventions for "{"
placement.

That in itself is not so bad, but it can possibly lead to the sort of
environment where everyone has their own little version of common helper
macros / function / libraries.

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pmarin
Amazing. the wikipedia says: "which, without the header file, cannot be
quickly or easily typed on some international and non-QWERTY keyboards"

Anyone have one of those keyboards?

