Or they just drop the =
Comment on Bell Labs 'Unix' Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball
xthexder@l.sw0.com 20 hours agoI think it’s actually quite elegant. No matter what it has to skip over argument 0 which will be the executable name echo.
If the subtraction was removed and the loop changed to <, it would then need to do an addition or subtraction inside the loop to check if it’s the last argument.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
palordrolap@fedia.io 19 hours ago
The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change
var++andvar--into++varand--varwhen the initial values aren't needed.As compiler optimisations go, it's a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 19 hours ago
Well, good news, the source code is right there. Someone can go check (it probably won’t be me)
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I was going to guess the same regarding the time period.