Multi-dimensional list initialization

[Mark Lawrence]

On 09/11/2012 06:37, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:07:09 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>> On 07/11/2012 01:55, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Who knows? Who cares? Nobody does:
>>>>
>>>> n -= n
>>>>
>>>>
>>> But I've seen this scattered through code:
>>>
>>> x := x - x - x
>>
>> Can you enlighten us as to how this is better than either:
>>   x := -x
>> or
>>   x := 0 - x
>> ? I'm not seeing it.
>
> I'm hoping that Mark intended it as an example of crappy code he has
> spotted in some other language rather than a counter-example of something
> you would do.

Correct, CORAL 66 and pointed out to me by a colleague when another team 
member had resigned.

>
> To be pedantic... there may very well be some (rare) cases where you
> actually do want x -= x rather than just x = 0. Consider the case where x
> could be an INF or NAN. Then x -= x should give x = NAN rather than zero.
> That may be desirable in some cases.

Interesting what comes up when we get chatting here.  I hope we don't 
get punished for going off topic :)

>
> At the very least, the compiler should NOT optimize away x = x - x to
> x = 0 if x could be a float, complex or Decimal.
>

X was an int so almost certainly optimised away by the SDL compiler on 
VMS of 1986 or 1987.

-- 
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.