Re: Origins of == in C

>, Brendan Gowing <Brendan.Gowing@cs.tcd.ie> writes:
> >The distinction between = and == in C has caused me no end of grief. ...
>
> >[My recollection is that they used = for assignment because it's a lot more
> >common than comparison. Besides, it's Fortran-compatible. -John]
>
> The moderator's comment is correct. As far as I can remember, someone
> somewhere along the line found that the number of assignments in a
> typical program far outweighed the number of equality checks. This was
> acknowledged by C's designers who reasoned that the single "=" for
> assignment would save key strokes over the more typical ":=".


In his article _Development of C_, Dennis Ritchie writes:


        Other fiddles in the transition from BCPL to B were introduced AS
        A MATTER OF TASTE [emphasis mine], and some remain controversial,
        for example the decision to use the single character = for
        assignment instead of :=.


It doesn't read as some transition that are really well planned.


Joachim


PS: Cited from the HOPL-II preprint (SIGPLAN Notices, March 93), p.202.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
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