Assignment Versus Equality

[Bob Gailer]

On Jun 26, 2016 5:29 PM, "Michael Torrie" <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 06/26/2016 12:47 PM, Christopher Reimer wrote:

> Sounds like fun.  Every aspiring programmer should write an interpreter
> for some language at least once in his life!

In the mid 1970' s I helped maintain an installation of IBM' s APL
interpreter at Boeing Computer Services. APL uses its own special character
set, making code unambiguous and terse. It used a left-arrow for
assignment, which was treated as just another operator. I will always miss
"embedded assignment".

A year later I worked on a project that ran on a CDC 6600? where only
FORTRAN was available. The program's job was to apply user's commands to
manage a file system. FORTRAN was not the best language for that task, so I
designed my own language, and wrote an interpreter for it in FORTRAN. In
retrospect a very good decision. That program was in use for 10 years!