[568] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: Assignment Operator.

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tue Nov 8 20:17:10 1994 )

From: brandon@avon.declab.usu.edu
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 94 18:15:08 -0700

< a valid reason for not changing it: you have to rewrite all existing code.
< trivial but annoying. 

I thought of this, and 1 unix command would suffice (from a valid textdump):

sed "s/ = / := /g" textdump > textdump.out

(although it would mess up any text you had with ' = ' in it).

< even more trivial: its an extra character ;)

Damn, I didn't think of that 8)

< I don't see arguments about difficulty of grasping the concept of
< assignment vs test of equality as particularly reasonable. That would
< be like changing english "no" to something else just because japanese
< "no" means something different. explain the concept of assignment,
< explain the concept of test for equality, then explain the sybols for
< these operations.

It isn't the concept of assignment versus test of equality that people
get hung up on, it is just simple confusion of a single equals sign with
a double equals sign.  (Do keep in mind: even though you may not see many
people experiencing this problem, it still is a problem.  Ask yourself how
much time you spend helping 'newbies' (the more time you have spent the
more aware to this actual circumstance you would be)).

-Brandon (Lynx)-