Assignment in test: OK?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <4641:Sep1919:49:5990 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu>, brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> Right. That's why you need to preserve that function, as :=. But
> changing the common = to not return a value will not affect 99% of the
> lines in a typical program, and it will catch the beginner's if (a = b).
...
> Furthermore, =/:=/== has an important benefit: The code-checker no
> longer needs to special-case a = b when it's looking for ignored values.

I'm getting sick of this.  If you want a language which has no = / ==
problem, Scheme, with its
	(set variable value)		;; assignment
	(eq? thing1 thing2)		;; object identity
is hard to beat.  And there's a free compiler from DEC that turns it into
C.  (Best of all, none of those nasty malloc/free errors.)  But it doesn't
look like C?  Neither it does.  Wasn't that the point?

There's a _lot_ that C compilers could usefully warn about (like
uninitialised variables, dead code, *ptr - *ptr++, and so on).  = -vs- ==
is just one case among many.
-- 
Heuer's Law:  Any feature is a bug unless it can be turned off.