On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 01:41:41 -0700, Douglas Alan wrote: > I like to be able to read everything from left to right, and Lisp does > that more than any other programming language. > > I would definitely not like a language that obscures assignment by > moving it over to the right side of lines.
One could argue that left-assigned-from-right assignment obscures the most important part of the assignment, namely *what* you're assigning, in favour of what you're assigning *to*. In any case, after half a century of left-from-right assignment, I think it's worth the experiment in a teaching language or three to try it the other way. The closest to this I know of is the family of languages derived from Apple's Hypertalk, where you do assignment with: put somevalue into name (Doesn't COBOL do something similar?) Beginners found that *very* easy to understand, and it didn't seem to make coding harder for experienced Hypercard developers. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
