Jonathan Saxton wrote:
On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:27:31 +0100, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
Congratulations, you just reinvented one of the most infamous
source of bugs in C, C++, Java, PHP, javascript and quite a few
other languages. Believe it or not, but not allowing this in
Python was a very deliberate design choice.
Oh, but those hundreds of thousands of man-hours lost to bugs
caused by assignment-as-an-expression is nothing compared to the
dozens of man- minutes saved by having one fewer line of code!
*wink*
And if I ever find the genius who had the brilliant idea of using =
to mean assignment then I have a particularly nasty dungeon reserved
just for him. Also a foul-smelling leech-infested swamp for those
language designers and compiler writers who followed his example.
(Come to think of it, plagiarizing a bad idea is probably the worse
evil.)
C was derived from BCPL, which used ":=" and "=".
Fortran uses "=" and ".EQ.", probably because (some) earlier autocodes
did.
It's a pity that Guido chose to follow C.
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