Juho Schultz wrote: > Fortran 90 allowed >, >= instead of .GT., .GE. of Fortran 77. But F90 > uses ! as comment symbol and therefore need /= instead of != for > inequality. I guess just because they wanted. However, it is one more > needless detail to remember. Same with the suggested operators.
The point is that it is just *not* the same. The suggested operators are universal symbols (unicode). Nobody would use ≠ as a comment sign. No need to remember was it .NE. or -ne or <> or != or /= ... There is also this old dispute of using "=" for both the assignment operator and equality and how it can confuse newcomers and cause errors. A consequent use of unicode could solve this problem: a ← b # Assignment (now "a = b" in Python, a := b in Pascal) a = b # Eqality (now "a == b" in Python, a = b in Pascal) a ≡ b # Identity (now "a is b" in Python, @a = @b in Pascal) a ≈ b # Approximately equal (may be interesting for floats) (I know this goes one step further as it is incompatible to the existing use of the = sign in Python). Another aspect: Supporting such symbols would also be in accord with Python's trait of being "executable pseudo code." -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
