A Bug By Any Other Name ...

MRAB python at mrabarnett.plus.com
Tue Jul 7 09:07:00 EDT 2009


Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Jul 2009 19:48:39 -0700, Daniel Fetchinson
> <fetchinson at googlemail.com> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.general:
> 
>> Yes, there are plenty of languages other than Java and C, but the
>> influence of C is admittedly huge in Python. Why do you think loops
>> are called "for", conditionals "if" or "while", functions return via
>> "return", loops terminate via "break" and keep going via "continue"
>> and why is comparison written as "==", etc, etc? All of these are
>> coming from C (or an even earlier language) and my point is that users
> 
> 	for, if, and return were common keywords in FORTRAN.
> 
> 	Not to mention BASIC
> 
> 	Both of which predate C
> 
FORTRAN also used "=" for assignment (and ".EQ." for comparison).

C was derived from BCPL which used ":=" for assignment and "=" for
comparison.



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