Why = = (and not just =)

[David Robinow]

"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote in message news:<vp608amhe0jh1d at news.supernews.com>...
> Fortran started the trend of using the same symbol, but Fortran
> was unrepentently statement oriented, and had a rather restricted
> expression syntax to boot. The original language in the Algol family,
> Algol 60, used ":=" as the assignment operator as I recall, a tradition
> followed by Pascal.
 You must be thinking of BASIC.
 Fortran did no such thing.  Originally, Fortran had only the arithmetic if, i.e.,
      IF (A-B) 10, 20, 30

Later, the logical if was added,
      IF (A .EQ. B) GO 20