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From: Alex McDonald <blog@rivadpm.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2012 13:36:21 -0700 (PDT)
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On Jun 7, 1:21 pm, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson
<joh...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...@verizon.invalid> writes:
[snip]

>
>                                  <><><>
>
> Another point to make.  Why do we assign from right to left?  Is it in
> any way natural?  What's wrong with
>
>   a + b --> c                  "a plus b assigned to c"
>
> instead of
>
>   c <-- a + b                  "c becomes a + b?"
>
> The more I think about it, I believe the former construct is a bit more
> natural since we read from left to right.  However, I'd want to see or
> work on a non-trivial project in such a language to make up my mind.

But we already have languages that support

  a b + c ! ( stack based, for bang read store )

or

  ADD A TO B GIVING C.

I'll let you guess which languages support these constructs.

>
> For an Arabic programming language, all bets are off.

   ! c + b a

My first example reversed. The arity of the operators make it easy to
parse left to right too; "Store in c the sum of a and b". It would be
a trivial modification to a stack-based compiler to parse right to
left.