Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choice of = for assignment and == for equality testing won, but of course that's not a choice in a vacuum and it's tied up with a thousand other choices.
> ultimately DRAM is mutable
Ultimately the CPU executes machine code, but I don’t see you directly writing that. You’re cherry-picking to defend an indefensible position.
primes = 2 : sieve primes [3..]
sieve (p:ps) xs = let (h, t) = span (< p*p) xs in h ++ sieve ps (filter (\n -> rem n p > 0) t)
When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instead of .EQ..
But it didn’t have to happen that way. ALGOL decided to stick close to mathematical tradition:
= for equality
:= for assignment ("definition")
While x := x + 1 is still not clean mathematical notation, I think it wouldn’t have riled up OP’s father as much. If he’d squinted enough, he might even have been able to see little indices below the x’s there.
x := 4
x ⇐ 4The Xerox keyboards had the support for ⇐, with its workstation OSes being all graphical based.
When Smalltalk grew beyond Xerox PARC walls, ⇐ turned into :=
You can see this in the original Xerox PARC documents and books for Smalltalk.
X is 5
X is x + 5
I kid, of course, but "X is x + 5" brings Prolog to mind with all the unification and bidirectionality that implies.
Grammatically, this would not change X. "...GIVING X" would just return X. Since it's part of the same statement, it seems it should ignore the "ADD 5 TO X" part.
Now, if you'd like to place the result into X, I suggest "ADD 5 TO X" would suffice as the entire statement.
x is 5
x is x + 5
Set x to x + 5
Except that COBOL doesn’t allow an arithmetic expression there, so you have to write
COMPUTE X = X + 5.
And now we have all 3 in Python (=, ==, and :=) which makes me sad.
if is_logged_in=True:
allow_access()
is_logged_in := True
if is_logged_in := True:
(is_logged_in := True)
:= was bolted on after of course, and I think that was a mistake, but no one asked me, nor do I expect anyone to ;P
10 X = X + 1
20 Y = Y - X
After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in computer books, I read a good portion of it even though I had never touched dBASE in my life. I would daydream of all the little forms, queries, reports and labels I could make with dBASE. But I never got to touch dBASE in my life. We kids used to get LOGO lessons instead in school.
One day my father came back from his evening lesson mildly distressed about something he had learnt. He said they were being taught loops but in the loop there was an equation that seemed just plain wrong. It was:
How could that be a valid equation? How could i ever equal i + 1? He mentioned that he had asked the teacher about it and from what I could gather, my teacher and my father were talking past each other. The teacher probably tried explaining that it was not an equation but an instruction instead, whereas my father continued to interpret i = i + 1 as an equation due to the algebra he was so familiar with. It sort of held up the class for a while.The teacher asked my father's name, perhaps so that he could talk to him separately later. But when he learnt my father's name, he realised that his son, me, went to the same school where he taught. So he told my father, 'When you get back home, ask your son about i = i + 1. He will explain it to you better than I am able to.'
And indeed I was able to explain it to him pretty well. I was eight or nine years old back then. And that was probably the first thing I taught my father!