Re: Just an observation

Joe Pluta wrote:

raging debate between Pascal and C syntax. In Pascal, the equality operator is one character ("=") and the assignment operator is two (":="). As you know, in C and its derivatives, assignment is one character ("=") and equality is two ("=="). There would be screaming matches about this, with the C advocates actually doing statistical analysis of code to prove that there were more assignments than comparisons, and thus C was more productive.

Personally, I've always felt that both Niklaus Wirth and Dennis Ritchie were full of equine scat on that one: if a language as advanced as PL/I, and one as simple as all but the most rudimentary dialects of BASIC, can both recognize whether "=" was being used in an assignment context or an equality context, then why SHOULD there be separate operators, at least for general use? Sure, in the 0.01% of cases where the context is ambiguous, there ought to be a separate ":=" (and maybe even a separate "==") to allow specificity, but for the other 99.99% of cases, there is no ambiguity of context, and no need for separate equality and assignment operators.

I demonstrated how easy it is (at least with recursive descent parsing) to recognize the context of an "=" over two decades ago, when I took compiler construction at the university (a graduation requirement for all CS majors), and the assignment was to write the compiler for a degenerate subset of Modula-2.


At any rate, as far as I'm concerned, NO ONE LANGUAGE, NOT EVEN PL/I, IS THE RIGHT TOOL FOR EVERY SINGLE JOB.