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From: mac <acolvin@efunct.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Why are ambiguous grammars usually a bad idea? Why are languages usually defined and implemented with ambiguous grammars?
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2022 19:51:53 -0000 (UTC)
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> [Interesting take.  In reality, of couse, BASIC borrowed that from Fortran.  Algol
> used := for assignment, different from = for equality comparison. -John]

Indeed.
Unfortunately, assignment is probably the single most common operator.
The ASCII committee should have kept the left-arrow character instead of
replacing it with underscore.