3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
7:01 p.m.
On Tue, 3 Jan 2012, Dave McGuire wrote:
A very early memory of mine was reading a BASIC
program for the first
time. I saw a line like this:
40 A = A + 1
...and I remember being very confused, saying "no, it isn't!!"
Pascal's assignment operator does little to address this, and APL's
does it well, but since all it took was reading like two sentences in a
book to learn what was going on, it seems this isn't really a big
problem in search of a solution.
Whilst attempting to explain the difference between equality and
assignment, I wrote:
N = 1
N = N + 1
I told the class, "That is a proof by INDUCTIVE LOGIC that all numbers are
the same. That would bring about total destruction of the universe.
Therefore, never let any mathematician see it! Oh, wait. Are there any
mathematicians in this class?"
A few, very few, got it.