Re: What does = mean, was Why are ambiguous grammars usually a bad idea?

From	Jan Ziak <0xe2.0x9a.0x9b@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: What does = mean, was Why are ambiguous grammars usually a bad idea?
Date	2021-12-30 17:10 -0800
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<21-12-035@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<21-12-003@comp.compilers> <21-12-017@comp.compilers> <21-12-022@comp.compilers> <21-12-026@comp.compilers> <21-12-033@comp.compilers>

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On Friday, December 31, 2021 at 12:45:56 AM UTC+1, Jan Ziak wrote:
> On Thursday, December 30, 2021 at 7:56:15 PM UTC+1, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> > When I started programming from nothing, I saw BASIC examples in a
> > book which was doing things like:
> >
> > 10 X = 2
> > 20 X = X + 1
> >
> > The only language with formulas that I was coming from was math.
> >
> > So, I thought, what? How can X be equal to X + 1; you cannot solve
> > this absurdity!
> >
> > From then I knew that the people who program computers to understand
> > symbols are free thinkers who make them mean anything they want.
>
> "X = X + Y" means "X[t+1] = X[t] + Y[t]" where t is time. Time had to be
> omitted from the notation of the BASIC programming language because otherwise
> the source code would consume a much larger amount of computer memory and it
> would complicate GOTO and FOR/NEXT statements.
>
> -atom
>
> [Interesting take. In reality, of course, BASIC borrowed that from Fortran.
> Algol used := for assignment, different from = for equality comparison. -John]

@John: Indeed, BASIC wasn't the 1st programming language. To generalize, I
wanted to point out that the notion of time is implicit to almost all
programming languages, of course not just BASIC. In my opinion, contrary to
the Kaz's opinion, most children who will later become programmers can quite
easily understand what "X=X+1" means in a language like BASIC/Python/etc.
(Thus, I disagree with the belief that "people who program computers to
understand symbols are free thinkers who make them mean anything they want".)

-atom

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