alderson@Jessica.stanford.edu (Rich Alderson) (12/22/88)
In article <2185@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes: >On ":=" versus "=": Altos had an backward arrow assignment key, not "<-" for >Mesa. (this could correspond to other language arrows (UP) ^ and (RIGHT) >"->".) Just standardize some extra characters. 8-) It will never happen. The original Algol specification was for TWO languages: The one most people think of as Algol 60 was intended as the machine-readable version, using current ("IBM") keypunches. The other, intended for algorithm specification in print, used a different character set. Specifically, the assignment operator in the latter was an arrow pointing to the left. The two-character form ":=" was chosen to disambiguate assignment from the Boolean equality operator "=".