[668] in Coldmud discussion meeting
Re: assignment operator
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tue Mar 7 16:33:06 1995
)
From: bellegj@monitor.cs.orst.edu
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 07 Mar 95 14:46:48 PST."
<m0rm69a-000KcEC@serial>
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 95 13:24:59 PST
> I'd like to propose '->' be the assignment operator. It visually represents
> what happens to the variable being assigned the new value. It has no chance
> of being pronounced, 'equals'. It looks cool...
>
> @program $root.init_root
> if (caller() != $root)
> throw(~perm, "Caller is not $root.");
> child_index -> 0;
> owners -> setadd([this()], sender());
> fertile -> 0;
My biggest problem with this is that the -> implies implies flow from
information from left to right. If I was to read
foo -> bar;
My first reaction would say that bar takes the value of foo instead of foo
takes the value of bar.
My own take on the assignment-as-expression issue is that while it would be
nice I don't think it's woth complicating the language to get.