Why = = (and not just =)

[John Roth]

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:fnhb61-3e5.ln1 at beastie.ix.netcom.com...
> John Roth fed this fish to the penguins on Sunday 19 October 2003 14:23
> pm:
>
> > Fortran started the trend of using the same symbol, but Fortran
> > was unrepentently statement oriented, and had a rather restricted
>
>         Pardon? There is a great difference between = and .eq. in FORTRAN.
F90
> is the first standard Fortran I've seen that permitted symbols (=, <,
> >) in place of the dotted notation (.eq., .lt., .gt.)

But the dotted symbols came later. They weren't in the original Fortran's
in the 50s and 60s that I learned from...

The original Fortran was a syntactic mess - a large part of the impetus
for all the work on computer language syntax was caused by the
horrors of Fortran and COBOL syntax.

John Roth