Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Assignment in test: OK? Message-ID: <3748@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Date: 13 Sep 90 09:41:29 GMT References: <1990Sep5.185451.25532@DRD.Com> Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 14 In article , burley@world.std.com (James C Burley) writes: > Perhaps C fanatics will disagree with this, but I don't take > seriously people who essentially would say "no, '=' is Right because I'm used > to it" when I'm saying if it had been ':=' from the beginning, THAT is what > we'd all be used to, without having to have gone through RUN-time debugging > to find our early mistakes. History lesson: it *WAS* ":=" in the beginning. C is descended (via B) from BCPL, in which assignment is ":=". Evidently someone along the way _did_ believe that ":=" was Wrong. (Actually, Pop admirers know that the Right way is "rvalue -> lvalue". (:-)) -- Heuer's Law: Any feature is a bug unless it can be turned off.