On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Ned Deily <n...@acm.org> wrote: > In article > <captjjmqrrxsx0rhu0bshqhbawym6_nwb6ex3hketjwmdadq...@mail.gmail.com>, > Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Pascal tried to create a new operator, := to be read "becomes", to >> deal with the whole equality-vs-assignment issue. > > Um, Pascal was just following the lead of ALGOL 60, roughly a decade earlier.
Sorry, the word "create" was poorly chosen. Would "deploy" be better? I'm aware there's a family; what I'm trying to say is that, in Pascal (I prefer to use a better-known language for discussion, where possible), there's a new operator instead of =. Anyway, my point is that it doesn't really help much. Imperative code is temporal (maybe functional or declarative code could be closer to maths, but we're talking Python here, which is imperative), where mathematical truth is timeless. If a² + b² = c² now, then it still will be true tomorrow. In programming, that's far from guaranteed (though compilers will often optimize if they know there's a section of code where the three won't change). You have to get your head around that, whether you're doing assignment or comparison, and using a different symbol to represent them is doing yourself as much of a disservice as avoiding + for addition of floats to emphasize that they don't always work like real numbers. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
