15 Aug
2005
15 Aug
'05
9:29 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated:
The difference between equality and assignment can be a tough one for
beginning programmers to master. It would make life easier to use the
left arrow, as APL does, instead of the "equals sign" for assignment.
... or the N := N + 1, or MOV N, N + 1 , or even the LET N = N + 1 ,
as used by Kurtz and Kemeny in their early versions of BASIC.
Using '=' seems natural to me, but then again, I'm a programmer, not a
mathematician.
Back in college, I took electronics for non-EE majors. The first half of
the course dealt with analog electronics (including the analog
characteristics of transistors) and while most of the other students had an
easy time with that portion, I struggled hard and I *still* don't quite
understand the operating characteristics of a transistor, or what exactly
the difference is between a PNP and NPN transistor.
Second half the course though, was digital electronics which I found
trivial, although most of the other students had real difficulty with the
concept of +5V being a logical 1 (what? 5 = 1? What? What the hell are
you talking about?) and the less said about Boolean algebra, the better 8-P
And if programmer can't grasp the difference between equality and
assignment, then heaven help us when you get to pointers ...
-spc (Thankfully, never had much difficulty with pointers since I had
Assembly *before* hitting C ... )