behavior of =

[Tony Plate]

At 08:41 AM 11/8/2002 -0800, A.J. Rossini wrote:
>[...]
>The "<-" assignment operator is beautiful.  It's taken me over a
>decade, but I have come to appreciate it.  It isn't common, and there
>are fewer and fewer ex-APL'ers, but I think it's a great choice.
>
>The use of "=" for named arguments in a function call signature makes
>sense, and the use of "==" for equality makes sense.
>
>But syntactical sugar should only be messed with if broken (and yes,
>this may be one of the few points that I'd disagree with John; I wish
>he'd never introduced "=" as a possible assignment).
>
>best,
>-tony

Yup, the S-language does have 3 separate symbols available for 3 separate 
functions ("=" for named arguments, "<-" for assignment, and "==" for 
equality).  Like Tony Rossini, I'd rather that these did not 
overlap.  Would it be possible to give parse() (and source()) an argument, 
or allow a pragma in a file, that would disallow the use of "=" for 
assignment?  (Since "=" was introduced as an assignment operator in S 
implementations, I've been bitten by the bug of a "="/"==" typo a couple of 
times, and have never seen any benefit from the change.)

-- Tony Plate

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