On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:45:12PM +0000, Roger Browne wrote: > On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:08 -0800, Chip Salzenberg wrote: > > Therefore, I propose requiring people to spell aliasing as ':='. > > Is some different symbol possible, to avoid confusing people who use > Algol-like languages where ":=" means assignment (Amber, Ada, Eiffel, > Delphi...)?
You've apparently never seen Damian's talk about stupid language tricks. I have. So I know that any language using ":=" for assignment is doomed to obscurity.[*] It's a law of nature. The clinching reason is that the largest crossover populations of PIR programmers will know C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and/or sh, with a smattering of C++. Those languages all use '=' for assignment. And PIR has also historically used '=' for assignment; it's just been inconsistent about the precise target (register vs. PMC). > "=>" for aliasing (looks like something pointing to something else), And that symbol has a really strong semantic history as a pair creation operator in Perl. If it were nonetheless forced to become some kind of modification operator, it looks like it would be modifying the thing on the right.... (Ah, language design. :-)) [*] Remember, 'obscure' does not mean 'bad' or 'dead'. -- Chip Salzenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
