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From: toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: :=
Message-ID: <6082@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 6 Oct 89 15:23:37 GMT
References: <1989Oct3.182931.518@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <6054@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> <113@tacitus.tfic.bc.ca>
Reply-To: toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 20

In article <113@tacitus.tfic.bc.ca> clh@tacitus.UUCP (Chris Hermansen) writes:
>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
>
>What does
>	i<-37
>mean, given this symbology; "i becomes 37" or "i lessthan -37"?

Well, in languages that don't allow embedded assignments operations, there
is no syntactic conflict. As a statement it would be the former and as an
expression it would be the latter. I don't find this confusing from a 
programmers point of view, unlike BASIC's use of "=" for both "becomes"
and "equals". Just try explaining that to a beginning programmer! The 
assignment operation needs something distinctive that does not look like
equals. Maybe we should use "i setq 37". :-)

Tom Almy
toma@tekgvs.labs.tek.com
Standard Disclaimers Apply