[Python-Dev] Every Release Can Be a Mini "Python 4000", Within Reason (was (name := expression) doesn't fit the narrative of PEP 20)

[Greg Ewing]

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

    IF (X-Y) 10, 20, 30

going three different ways depending on whether X-Y was negative,
zero or positive.

Then when comparison operators were added, a lot of people
didn't have "<" and ">" characters available to them, so
FORTRAN used ".EQ.", ".LT.", ".GT." etc. instead. We're
actually quite spoiled with our "==" operator!

-- 
Greg