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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Traditionally? I don't think there was a "tradition". ":=" was used in Algol. "=" was used in Fortran. COBOL didn't use either "=" or ":=".

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FORTRAN was far from the first high level language.

Plankalkül for example was out a decade earlier and used →. EX:

  P1 max3 (V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0],V2[:8.0]) → R0[:8.0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

So, there really was a lot of languages out there, but := was fairly common because it was easy to parse and type.

Plankalkül had the advantage of not having to run on a real machine.

As far as := is concerned having to use the shift key for an assignment is less than ideal but there really aren't any better options on a modern keyboard. I think C's use of = is a bit braindamaged but it is nice and quick to type.

On an ASR33 = is the character you have press shift for. : is unshifted.

Many early video terminals and microcomputers had similar layouts, because they were easy to implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

It didn't actually contribute much to the evolution of other languages though, right? Had anyone even heard of it when Fortran/ALGOL/etc were being designed?

Zuse seems to have been under the impression that some of the ALGOL designers were aware of it: https://books.google.com/books?id=AsvSBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA522&lpg=...

Rutishauser was, at least.

> "=" was used in Fortran.

And most BASICs, though some (most?) required the keyword LET to introduce an assignment, as well.

Let became optional quickly it seems

But most BASIC versions would accept 'let a = 1'

Personally, I don't see why the big fuss. If your assignment and comparison operators are the same the only thing you lose is doing x = (y == 2); kind of expressions (since you would disambiguate from conditional expressions).

Now, assignments are done more frequently than comparisons, hence why it makes sense for it to be the simpler/shorter one.

You wouldn't even lose that if you can accept that assignments can't be expressions, which seems like a bit less of a loss.

> And most BASICs, though some (most?) required the keyword LET to introduce an assignment, as well.

LET was virtually always optional; an expression by itself on a line (like 'X <> 10') is a syntax error anyway, so removing LET doesn't introduce any ambiguity.

From the article:

> Looking at this as a whole, = was never “the natural choice” the assignment operator. Pretty much everybody used := for assignment instead, possibly because = was so associated with equality. Nowadays most languages use = entirely because C uses it, and we can trace C using it to CPL being such a clusterfuck.

And I dispute the "pretty much everybody used" part. In fact, I think the article contradicts that opinion. Algol used it, and so did Pascal. But Pascal was only a year old [Edit: at the time the choice was made for C] - it [Pascal] hadn't set the world on fire yet (to the degree that ever did). That leaves Algol using ":=", and FORTRAN, COBOL, and Lisp not using it. That's not "pretty much everybody used".

Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say that "everybody from the Algol line used := for assignment", with C being the first language of that line to stop.

> From the article:

Articles, like desserts, aren't always right. I am sorely tempted to pull out Sammet's book tonight and start counting.

Too late to edit, but I've gone and done it: scanned through Sammet's Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals for languages with identifiable assignment statements. I skip assembly-style, English-like (COBOL etc.), and functional-style (LISP etc.) syntax, and for summary purposes ignore accompanying keywords like BASIC's LET.

Results:

ν = ε 18 (AMTRAN, BASIC, COLASL, CPS, FORTRAN, FORTRANSIT, JOSS, JOVIAL, Klerer-May, Laning & Zierler, MAD, MADCAP, MAP, MATH-MATIC, MIRFAC, PL/I, QUICKTRAN, UNICODE)

ν ← ε 4 (APL, DIALOG, IT, LISP2)

ε → ν 2 (MADCAP, NELIAC)

ν := ε 1 (ALGOL)

ε * ν 1 (BACIAC)

So pretty much everybody used ‘=’. ALGOL was an outlier, though admittedly more influential than BACIAC.

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