On 27/04/2018 08:38, Greg Ewing wrote:
How would you complete the following sentence? "The ':='
symbol is a much better symbol for assignment than '=',
because..."
... users new to programming but with a scientific background expect '='
to be a statement of an algebraic relationship between mathematical
quantities, not an instruction to the machine to do something.
That's easy to answer. (I can remember this particular light bulb
moment in a fellow student, who had been using a different name in every
assignment statement, and had found loops impossible to understand.)
Also it frees up '=' to be used with something like its expected meaning
in conditional statements, without making parsing hard/impossible. There
are arguments the other way, like brevity and familiarity to other
constituencies. But I feel we all know this.
Having chosen to go the '=', '==' route, the cost is large to change,
especially to get the other half of the benefit ('=' as a predicate). So
I think the question might be who is it better for and how much do we care.
And whether the days are gone when anyone learns algebra before programming.
I speculate this all goes back to some pre-iteration version of FORmula
TRANslation, where to its inventors '=' was definition and these really
were "statements" in the normal sense of stating a truth.
Jeff Allen
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