APL\360

Guy Sotomayor ggs at shiresoft.com
Fri Jan 29 14:36:01 CST 2021


On 1/29/21 12:21 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
> On 1/29/2021 12:59 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>
>>
>> Without OTHER changes in parsing arithmetic expressions, that may or 
>> may not be warranted, just replacing the '=' being used for 
>> assignment with an arrow ELIMINATED that particular confusion.  Well, 
>> mostly.  You can't use a right pointing arrow to fix 3 = X
>>
>
> Blame K&R with C with the '=' and '==' mess because assignment is a 
> operation. I never hear that C or PASCAL have problems.

We complained bitterly about this in the early days (Unix v6 days).  
They at least listened and fixed the =<op> (e.g. =+, =-) because of 
ambiguity but refused to change assignment.  I find it annoying that a 
type-o of forgetting an '=' in a comparison can result in a hard to find 
bug.


TTFN - Guy



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