27 Nov
2018
27 Nov
'18
7:48 p.m.
On 11/27/18 6:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
I love the use of an arrow for assignment.? In
teaching, a student's
FIRST encounter with programming can be daunting.? Use of an equal sign
immediately runs up against the long in-grained concept of commutative
equality.? You would be surprised how many first time students try to
say 3 = X .? Then, of course,
N = 1
N = N + 1
is a mathematical "proof by induction" that all numbers are equal!
(Don't let a mathematician see that, or the universe will cease to
exist, and be replaced by something even more inexplicable!)
It's worth noting that in 1963 ASCII, hex 5E was the up-arrow (now the
circumflex) and hex 5F was the left-arrow (now underline).
It's also worth nothing that in the original CDC 6-bit display code,
there were symbols, not only for left-to-right arrow, but not equals,
logical OR and AND, up- and down-arrow, equivalence, logical NOT,
less-than-or-equal, and greater-than-or equal--pretty much the original
Algool-60 special characters.
--Chuck