Programming PearlsProgramming Pearls JON BENTLEY AT&T Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, New Jerscy a vv ADDISON-WESLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY Reading, Massachusetts * Menlo Park, California Don Mills, Ontario. + Wokingham, England * Amsterdam Sydney * Singapore * Tokyo * Mexico City Bogoté * Santiago © San JuanMark S. Dalton/Publisher James T. DeWolf/Sponsoring Editor Hugh Crawford/Manufacturing Supervisor Karen Guardino/Managing Editor Laura Skinger/Production Supervisor Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bentley, Jon Louis. Programming pearls. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Electronic digital computers—Programming— Addresses, essays, lectures. 1. Title. QA76.6.B453 1986 00585-20088 ISBN 0-201-10331-1 Reprinted with corrections April, 1986 Copyright © 1986 by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publi Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada. ‘This book was typeset in Times Roman and Courier by the author, using a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 phototypesetter driven by a VAX-11/750 running the 8th Edition of the UNIX operating system. Cray-1 is a trademark of Cray Research, Inc. DEC, PDP and VAX are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. TRS-80 is a trademark of Tandy Corporation. UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories. BCDEFGHU-DO-89876