On 4/29/2018 11:51 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 10:45 AM, Eitan Adler <li...@eitanadler.com
<mailto:li...@eitanadler.com>> wrote:
On 29 April 2018 at 01:34, Jeff Allen <ja...@farowl.co.uk
<mailto:ja...@farowl.co.uk>> wrote:
> On 27/04/2018 08:38, Greg Ewing wrote:
> I speculate this all goes back to some pre-iteration version of FORmula
> TRANslation, where to its inventors '=' was definition and these really
were
> "statements" in the normal sense of stating a truth.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/
<https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/>
That blog post was brought up before in this discussion (probably on
python-ideas). I have my doubts about whether it accurately represents
the historic truth though.
It is woefully incomplete in omitting the common usage of = to mean
'equals' both as statement (comparison) and command (assignment) in both
English and math. I don't have any math books that I know of that
predate computers, but I suspect the usage is not new.
The pre-C computer language history has a gaping hole: BASIC, which uses
= for both assignment and comparison, was released May 1, 1964. I don't
believe the syntax allowed any ambiguity as to the meaning of each
occurrence. To me, it is the use of anything else that needs explaining.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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