For those who wonder, the extract comes from https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc/blob/ccbe90a2803e2cc7e177c77cf1d5c19dd13f6d02/last1120c/c00.c https://github.

For those who wonder, the extract comes from https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc/blob/ccbe90a2803e2cc7e177c77cf1d5c19dd13f6d02/last1120c/c00.c https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc/blob/ccbe90a2803e2cc7e... IMO, it is close to Assembly: * you reserve space and possibly set an original value with "hshsiz DB 100" or "paraml DB ?" * assignment is a different business which involves a runtime instruction (MOV) Hence the same difference (no = sign for the first, passive, compile-time operation; an = sign for the second, active, runtime operation) in this proto-C. (Of course, this doesn't answer your question of "when" did the syntax of those 2 operation fuse :-) )