Yet more evidence for Wadler's law

Posted Jun 30, 2018 12:41 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Yet more evidence for Wadler's law by HelloWorld
Parent article: PEP 572 and decision-making in Python

The convention of = as the assignment operator and == as the equality operator actually arose when Ken Thompson designed the B programming language, the predecessor of C. B in turn is derived from Martin Richards' programming language, BCPL, which does use := for assignment, but one of Thompson's goals when designing B was apparently “reducing the number of non-whitespace characters in a typical program” [Wikipedia article on B].