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From: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: NOT Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C
Message-ID: <1735@gannet.cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 20 Jan 90 16:24:57 GMT
References: <17036@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Sender: news@cl.cam.ac.uk
Reply-To: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK
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In article <17036@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>In article  <14199@lambda.UUCP> jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles) writes:
>>>[about +=, *= etc. operators]
>>...In fact, aside from C users, there seems to be no interest
>>in these operators at all.
>
>Icon has these sorts of operators.  Common Lisp has a special macro
>(define-modify-macro) for constructing these sorts of operators.  So
>there is at least _some_ interest in them.  I expect that of those
>language designers who aren't interested in them, most have never
>programmed much in a language that uses them.  They are very
>convenient.

Algol68 has assigning operators, e.g.  a +:= b, and they seem to be quite
popular with users of that language. It was probably the influence of 
Algol68, rather than C, which caused them to be added to the BCPL language:
all modern {:-)} BCPLs have <lhs> <operator>:= <rhs>.

Chris Thompson
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