On 30/04/2018 07:22, Greg Ewing wrote:
Jeff Allen wrote:
I speculate this all goes back to some pre-iteration version of
FORmula TRANslation, where to its inventors '=' was definition and
these really were "statements" in the normal sense of stating a truth.
Yeah, also the earliest FORTRAN didn't even *have* comparison
operators. A conditional branch was something like
I should have known that would turn out to be the most interesting part
in my message. Not to take us further off topic, I'll just say thanks to
Eitan's reply, I found this:
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf
They were not "statements", but "formulas" while '=' was assignment (sec
8) *and* comparison (sec 10B). So conversely to our worry, they actually
wanted users to think of assignment initially as a mathematical formula
(page 2) in order to exploit the similarity to a familiar concept,
albeit a=a+i makes no sense from this perspective.
Jeff Allen
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