[Bluej-discuss] confusion over =

[Paul McCard]

It was Ritchie who designed C.  He has a lot to answer for - given 
nearly 40 years of hindsight.  But don't blame Brian Kernighan, he just 
teamed up with Ritchie to write a very good book about it.  :-)

Paul.

Michael E. Caspersen wrote:
> Dijkstra pronounced the assignment operator "becomes", i.e.
>
>      a= b+c;
>
> reads "a becomes b+c".  I like that; it's simple and clear!
>
> BTW, notice the asymetrical notation; since = is an asymmetrical 
> operator, it should be written as such.  This helps parsing the 
> statement; it also reinforce that = is not the equality operator.
>
> In a similar way, again due to Dijkstra, I tend to put extra space 
> around low priority operators -- again to help the eye (or what's 
> behind it) to parse the expression.  E.g.
>
>      a + b*c
>
> It took mankind more than 150 years to agree upon = as the sign for 
> equality (it was only much later that it was concieved as a boolean 
> operator).  Kernighan & Ritchie did a lot of harm when they 
> "designed" the syntax of C.
>
> Best regards,
> Michael
>
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