On Wednesday, 20 June 2012 at 17:19:08 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Not to mention, there are some programming languages (e.g.
Pascal) which use := for normal assignment, so it would be
confusing for anyone familiar with those languages.
AutoIt or AutoHotKeys is one, where = and := do two very
different things (and confusing for a first time user).
As for the topic of discussion, I think := should not be used as
it has very few useful cases, but also it's making two
incompatible operators compatible.
Consider:
test:=5;
for(/*something*/) {
/*something*/
b++;
if (b > 10)
goto test;
}
--
In the example above, test:=5 should have been test: b=5. It may
potentially hide even worse bugs, where currently := is illegal
and easy to spot by a compiler error.
Besides, isn't 'auto' short enough? as mentioned you may save 2
characters. Not worth it. Be worse if you use it in two places
and it's now trying to declare the same variable twice and
there's nothing there suggesting it's being declared. One
character is easy to miss or forget.
The worst bugs I've gone against are usually the simplest,
easiest and most subtle.
