4 ms·

But why change the meaning of one of the most common mathematical symbols? Every new generation of programmers must then relearn what "=" means. If you see "="

But why change the meaning of one of the most common mathematical symbols? Every new generation of programmers must then relearn what "=" means. If you see "=" in a comment you are never really sure what it means, is it assignment or is it the standard mathematical predicate?

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
It's not changing the meaning at all. You're picking your preferred meaning, and I'm picking mine. Mine happens to be the almost universal standard for programming. Most lines of code are written as true statements. If you understand how a computer actually works at the register level you'd see that x=5; has a result. And it's not 5. It's TRUE. I'm not asking if x equals 5, I'm saying HEY YOU, X IS EQUAL TO 5. I'm telling the computer this is now the truth. 5 is moved into the x RAM location and the result is true, because the CPU is doing what I told it. You're just wrapped up in your semantic view. There is nothing wrong with = for assignment and == for evaluation. Someone would complain if it was the other way around, so just accept this is the standard - or make your own language that "does things right". But.... Just because it isn't the way you like it, doesn't make it wrong.
souprock 7y ago
Most programming languages change the meaning of one of the most common mathematical symbols. There are at least 3 meanings of "X = Y". Pascal: Is X equal to Y? C: Change X, making it equal to Y. Mathematics: X is equal to Y. Those are all valuable in programming. Normally programmers get the mathematical meaning via a feature such as __assume or __builtin_expect or assert. It can be used for optimization. When the constraint is violated, various bad things can happen. The code can run slower, halt with an error message, or behave in an undefined way. Every new generation of programmers starts off expecting the mathematical meaning. I don't know of any programming language which uses it. Ideally that would be fixed, but the change might be difficult for the current generation of programmers. Note that the Pascal meaning can be fairly compatible with the other meanings. The solution is simply to be aware of context. On a line by itself, X=Y makes no sense as an equality test. Within the controlling part of an "if" or loop, assignment need not be supported. That does the job. Alternately, the meaning could change by having a keyword in front for assignment ("let" is popular) and/or for the assertion. So we could distinguish all three meanings with syntax like "if X=Y", "let X=Y", and "assume X=Y".

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

It's not changing the meaning at all. You're picking your preferred meaning, and I'm picking mine. Mine happens to be the almost universal standard for programming. Most lines of code are written as true statements. If you understand how a computer actually works at the register level you'd see that x=5; has a result. And it's not 5. It's TRUE. I'm not asking if x equals 5, I'm saying HEY YOU, X IS EQUAL TO 5. I'm telling the computer this is now the truth. 5 is moved into the x RAM location and the result is true, because the CPU is doing what I told it. You're just wrapped up in your semantic view. There is nothing wrong with = for assignment and == for evaluation. Someone would complain if it was the other way around, so just accept this is the standard - or make your own language that "does things right". But.... Just because it isn't the way you like it, doesn't make it wrong.

souprock 7y ago

Most programming languages change the meaning of one of the most common mathematical symbols. There are at least 3 meanings of "X = Y". Pascal: Is X equal to Y? C: Change X, making it equal to Y. Mathematics: X is equal to Y. Those are all valuable in programming. Normally programmers get the mathematical meaning via a feature such as __assume or __builtin_expect or assert. It can be used for optimization. When the constraint is violated, various bad things can happen. The code can run slower, halt with an error message, or behave in an undefined way. Every new generation of programmers starts off expecting the mathematical meaning. I don't know of any programming language which uses it. Ideally that would be fixed, but the change might be difficult for the current generation of programmers. Note that the Pascal meaning can be fairly compatible with the other meanings. The solution is simply to be aware of context. On a line by itself, X=Y makes no sense as an equality test. Within the controlling part of an "if" or loop, assignment need not be supported. That does the job. Alternately, the meaning could change by having a keyword in front for assignment ("let" is popular) and/or for the assertion. So we could distinguish all three meanings with syntax like "if X=Y", "let X=Y", and "assume X=Y".