On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:31:18 +0000, MRAB wrote: >> And if I ever find the genius who had the brilliant idea of using = >> to mean assignment then I have a particularly nasty dungeon reserved >> just for him. Also a foul-smelling leech-infested swamp for those >> language designers and compiler writers who followed his example. >> (Come to think of it, plagiarizing a bad idea is probably the worse >> evil.) >> > C was derived from BCPL, which used ":=" and "=".
ISTR that Ritchie said that he chose "=" because assignment is more common than testing for equality, so C's approach meant less typing. > Fortran uses "=" and ".EQ.", probably because (some) earlier autocodes > did. > > It's a pity that Guido chose to follow C. OTOH, functional languages use "=" for binding (let x = ... in ...), which is more like C initialisation (which also uses "="). Python's "=" is somewhere between assignment and binding. It's arguable that Python should also have ":=" for in-place modification (as opposed to re-binding a name). E.g. for an array, "foo := bar" would be equivalent to "foo[:] = bar". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
