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I actually rationalized the '=' symbol in assignment into the following statement, "Let 'left hand side' be equal to 'right hand side'". Using this wording resolves some dissonance around its overloaded usage.
Fun fact: various dialects of BASIC let you optionally put LET before your assignment statements. So the following are equivalent:
X = 10
LET X = 10 The operator " = >" (pronounced "heffalump") is
convenient for referencing structures that are
accessed indirectly. The expression
a=>s.x is equivalent to the expression (@a)»s.x.
Wouldn't it be easier to use = for everything and get rid of those weird edge cases?
I actually rationalized the '=' symbol in assignment into the following statement, "Let 'left hand side' be equal to 'right hand side'". Using this wording resolves some dissonance around its overloaded usage.
Ditto. Fun fact: various dialects of BASIC let you optionally put LET before your assignment statements. So the following are equivalent: X = 10 LET X = 10
Well that at least gives me a good idea of why `:=` cropped up in Go. Having never studied anything older than C, it caught me by surprise.
Because K&R had terrible keyboards so they abbreviated everything as much as possible. Traditionally := was used for assignment, which makes sense since it is an asymmetric symbol for an asymmetric operation.
Traditionally? I don't think there was a "tradition". ":=" was used in Algol. "=" was used in Fortran. COBOL didn't use either "=" or ":=".
> Looking at this as a whole, = was never “the natural choice” the assignment operator. Pretty much everybody used := for assignment instead, possibly because = was so associated with equality. Nowadays most languages use = entirely because C uses it, and we can trace C using it to CPL being such a clusterfuck.
> A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957 and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let “=” denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x. Algol corrected this mistake by the simple solution: Let assignment be denoted by “:=”.
> Perhaps this may appear as nitpicking to programmers who got used to the equal sign meaning assignment. But mixing up assignment and comparison is a truly bad idea, because it requires that another symbol be used for what traditionally was expressed by the equal sign. Comparison for equality became denoted by the two characters “==” (first in C). This is a consequence of the ugly kind, and it gave rise to similar bad ideas using “++”, “--“, “&&” etc.
From Good ideas, through the Looking Glass by N. Wirth:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Good-Ideas%2C-through-...
Because K&R had terrible keyboards so they abbreviated everything as much as possible. Traditionally := was used for assignment, which makes sense since it is an asymmetric symbol for an asymmetric operation.
Because K&R had terrible keyboards so they abbreviated everything as much as possible. Traditionally := was used for assignment, which makes sense since it is an asymmetric symbol for an asymmetric operation.
PIP destination←source /switches
PIP destination=source
PIP destination_source