On 11/27/18 6:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > I love the use of an arrow for assignment. In teaching, a student's > FIRST encounter with programming can be daunting. Use of an equal sign > immediately runs up against the long in-grained concept of commutative > equality. You would be surprised how many first time students try to > say 3 = X . Then, of course, > N = 1 > N = N + 1 > is a mathematical "proof by induction" that all numbers are equal! > (Don't let a mathematician see that, or the universe will cease to > exist, and be replaced by something even more inexplicable!)
It's worth noting that in 1963 ASCII, hex 5E was the up-arrow (now the circumflex) and hex 5F was the left-arrow (now underline). It's also worth nothing that in the original CDC 6-bit display code, there were symbols, not only for left-to-right arrow, but not equals, logical OR and AND, up- and down-arrow, equivalence, logical NOT, less-than-or-equal, and greater-than-or equal--pretty much the original Algool-60 special characters. --Chuck