News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by roselan on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @07:22PM (#16806587)
What does prevent : to become the assignment operator of a language? It's short, and quite "explicit".

x: 2

Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by mpweiher on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @04:30AM (#16809119)
Self and Newspeak sort of do it this way, adding implicit self to Smalltalk's keyword syntax and accessor convention.

These 'accessors' also work on local variables, there is no special syntax for assignment. So when you write x it means send the message x, which starts its lookup in the local environment and works itself outwards. When you write x:2 it sends the message x: with argument 2, also starting in the local environment.

The accessors are automatically generated in pairs for slots. It sorta works, but it seems a bit too convoluted just to say "hey, we can do everything with just messaging".

Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by Izkata on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @12:16AM (#16807989)
The Rebol family of languages works like that.
Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by 9214 on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @02:26AM (#16808539)
Except that it doesn't. ":" in "x:" is not an assignment operator and "x" is not a variable.
Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by Izkata on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @08:09AM (#16810275)
Yes yes, it's a set-word! type in the "do" dialect. That's not how it's learned when first starting, though, and not usually the thing you're thinking about when using it moment-to-moment.
Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? by bwbw223 on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @09:11PM (#16807232)
Shift key?