Re: Just an observation

[James Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.