On 30/04/2018 07:22, Greg Ewing wrote:
Jeff Allen wrote:
I speculate this all goes back to some pre-iteration version of FORmula TRANslation, where to its inventors '=' was definition and these really were "statements" in the normal sense of stating a truth.
Yeah, also the earliest FORTRAN didn't even *have* comparison operators. A conditional branch was something like
I should have known that would turn out to be the most interesting part in my message. Not to take us further off topic, I'll just say thanks to Eitan's reply, I found this: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%... They were not "statements", but "formulas" while '=' was assignment (sec 8) *and* comparison (sec 10B). So conversely to our worry, they actually wanted users to think of assignment initially as a mathematical formula (page 2) in order to exploit the similarity to a familiar concept, albeit a=a+i makes no sense from this perspective. Jeff Allen