Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!bard
From: bard@brigid.cs.cornell.edu (Bard Bloom)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: :=
Message-ID: <32861@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 4 Oct 89 19:00:06 GMT
References: <1989Oct3.182931.518@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <6054@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: bard@cs.cornell.edu (Bard Bloom)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 20

In article <6054@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes:
>
>I personally would like to see the left arrow back. It makes more sense
>than colon equal (gag, why couldn't they at least have used <- ?) and both
>of these are easier to explain than the use of just the equals sign for
>assignment.

They couldn't have used `<-' because of the [near-]ambiguity of parsing
things like `x<-4'.  It might not actually be ambiguous in Algol 60; I don't
think that you could write things like `x <- y <- 4' as you can in Algol 68,
and the two or other things I tried (eg, with conditionals) had only one
type-correct and syntactically correct parsing.)  

They probably thought about using <= too, but that looks too much like a
comparison.  

I actually prefer the C style, using "=" for ":=" and "==" for "=", but it's
not a good choice.

-- Bard