Re:Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?
by tnecniv on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @12:18AM
(#16807995)
Technical papers are written using '<-' in pseudocode because the papers likely use '=' elsewhere to assert equality in a mathematical statement and they want to avoid confusion.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> avoid confusion
You’re kind of making the parent’s point.
Yes, although my intention was to further support their last statement which was left open to a degree.
There is a slight distinction. If you are creating a programming language, you can come up with whatever syntax you'd like for assignment and the user has to learn it. Some choices are better than others if you want your language to be used, but there is a specification for the language that you have written down, either as a human readable document or as the compiler/interpreter. With pseudocode in technical documents, the author typically lacks the space, time, and interest to generate such a specification and leans on mathematical notation to keep things precise.