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"Yeah, but has already been established in this conversation, you're not using them for the same concepts. So your argument doesn't work. Repeating it over and

"Yeah, but has already been established in this conversation, you're not using them for the same concepts. So your argument doesn't work. Repeating it over and over isn't going to make it work, either." No, we've established that math and programming languages are different things. Both share some concepts that are close enough so that using the same symbol is the obvious and sensible choice. It's not that equality in C would be such a different idea that a completely unrelated symbol was chosen. == is still similar to the = used in math, just not the same for technical reasons that are obsolete for several decades. "And, C didn't avoid := because the proper character wasn't available." I never said that. I said C chose to reuse the symbols from FORTRAN. To repeat part of the Wirth quote from above (but it's easy to find other sources): "It goes back to Fortran in 1957, and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers." FORTRAN was initially made for the IBM 704, which had a 6-bit character set that included a =, but no : character. The original FORTRAN manual from 1956[1] has the character table in appendix A on page 49. FORTRAN could not use := for what we would now consider assignment[2]. It did not have yet developed equality testing, just subtraction and branching on the differences signum result, so there was no need for an equality operator. Under these constraints = for assignment wasn't the worst choice, the mistake was sticking to it when technology evolved. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220704193549/http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102649787.05.01.acc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220704193549/http://archive.co... [2] The original FORTRAN manual from 1956 never speaks of assignment in this context. The ASSIGN statement is unrelated.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> I never said that. I said C chose to reuse the symbols from FORTRAN. To repeat part of the Wirth quote from above (but it's easy to find other sources): > "It goes back to Fortran in 1957, and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers." That's a pretty broad brush that Wirth is painting with. All those other language designers were blindly following FORTRAN; I'm the only one with the wisdom to break precedent. Yeah, um... that's way too broad a statement. Each language followed precedent and broke precedent in certain areas, and they all did so for what they thought were good reasons. "What people are used to" is one reason, but far from the only one. The "number of characters" reason was one I read from (IIRC) Brian Kernighan. I trust him to have a better grasp of the design logic of C than Wirth does.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> I never said that. I said C chose to reuse the symbols from FORTRAN. To repeat part of the Wirth quote from above (but it's easy to find other sources): > "It goes back to Fortran in 1957, and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers." That's a pretty broad brush that Wirth is painting with. All those other language designers were blindly following FORTRAN; I'm the only one with the wisdom to break precedent. Yeah, um... that's way too broad a statement. Each language followed precedent and broke precedent in certain areas, and they all did so for what they thought were good reasons. "What people are used to" is one reason, but far from the only one. The "number of characters" reason was one I read from (IIRC) Brian Kernighan. I trust him to have a better grasp of the design logic of C than Wirth does.