Re: colon-equal vs equal

From:
Date: Thu Dec 22 1988 - 15:02:04 EST


In article <3300001@uxg.cso.uiuc.edu>, phil@uxg.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
> How did the := come into being in languages like Algol, Pascal, and Ada?

It originated with ALGOL-60. The European `bondage-and-discipline' school of
language design (the people who brought you Algol-68, Pascal, Modula, Ada, and
Modula-2 and are now having yet another try at getting their mistakes right in
Modula-3) likes to claim apostolic descent from that language, and
they've retained := and some of its other crotchets.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eiffel is squarely in this line of descent.

> of course, i have two misgivings about the line... (1) there are a
> couple things i actually like about Eiffel, and (2) i'm jewish... we
> invented b&d ethics ;-)

I think of Eiffel as a "one-good-idea" language. The one good idea is
contract programming.

-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it. -- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.

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