Perhaps this is why BASIC originally used LET in the form LET X = X + 1, to imply a calculation rather than equality.
replyThink that was just to make the parser understand it was an assignment without having to do any lookahead. There was also possibly ambiguous stuff with equality and assingment as they both used =.
replySome of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.
replyIt’s a pity your father’s perspective didn’t prevail. We’d all be using better programming languages now.
replyIt's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing.
replyWhere this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choice of = for assignment and == for equality testing won, but of course that's not a choice in a vacuum and it's tied up with a thousand other choices.
I think parent was alluding to mutability.
replyWhile I'm a big fan of immutable design, it makes some algorithms much more expensive and ultimately DRAM is mutable. And the example we're talking about could be a loop counter!
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