Re: make == as = ?

> But making == a synonym for = is just syntactic sugar,

Sure.

> of no obvious practical benefit that I can see.

I can see a small practical benefit, as I could skip the expression part
of my course just by telling them "same as java". No big deal, I agree.

> I think its alleged utility in teaching C/Java/perl programmers is
> overstated - if they think of == as equality will they also think of =
> as assignment?

Maybe. The good news is that = is already used for assignment in SQL
(UPDATE foo SET bla=zzz), so it is already C-compatible;-) ;-)

> And the fact that C (stupidly) uses = for assignment is the whole reason
> for the existence of == in the first place, and many languages (e.g. see
> the algol family) do not suffer from this defect.

I'm not claiming that C choices were good.

> The last reason I advance against this is that operator space is scarce,

??? [!=<>+-*/%&~(at)]+ does not look scarce to me. Postgres has the largest
operator space I ever seen!

> and if we do use == somewhere it should be to some better purpose than
> this.

I'm not sure it would be good to have "==" meaning anything but "=", as a
lot of people are "used" to C/C++/java/perl.

Anyway, << bonnes Paques >>,

--
Fabien Coelho - coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr