Assignment Versus Equality

[MRAB]

On 2016-06-27 14:59, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2016-06-26, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>
>> (Note, for those who don't know (old) Fortran, that spaces and tabs are
>> not significant. So those dots are needed, otherwise "a eq b" would be
>> parsed as "aeqb".)
>
> I've always been baffled by that.
>
> Were there other languages that did something similar?
>
Algol 60 and Algog 68.

> Why would a language designer think it a good idea?
>
It let you have identifiers like "grand total"; there was no need for 
camel case or underscores to separate the parts of the name.

> Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea?
>