[thetruthseeker1]

When I learnt programming, i was confused by x=x+1;

After I understood what it really meant, I wondered why they didn’t use some other symbol to capture this semantic. Say something like x <- x+1 ; Which implies assignment rather than equality - That way this would be unambiguous and I feel is more clear. I now guess the choice of using ‘=‘ was probably an attempt at making a (compromised) choice given the limited symbols that were available back when High level languages were first written?

[Zarel]

Heh, I just read an explanation of this the other day:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/

The summary is that C used it because assignment was a lot more common than equality checking, and back then, typing fewer characters was a big deal.

[gcmac]

Go write a couple hundred lines of R (please don't actually do this R is atrocious imo) and then you'll understand why '=' is used instead of '<-' - because it's a pain in the ass, even with hotkeys

[haZard_OS]

Hey, hey, hey! R IDEs give plenty of options which utterly mitigate such alleged difficulties:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1741820/what-are-the-dif...

[abhishekjha]

R has = as well which has been working equivalently for me so far. Any caveats?

[jcranberry]

Similar notation is already used for mappings in general albeit from left to right with the bar arrow, and obscures one of the necessary characteristics of recursive functions, which is a mapping to the natural numbers.

Edit: Misunderstood, thought you were talking about math, not programming languages.

[egwynn]

Some languages made slightly better design choices, just not the ones that became super popular!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#...

[kirillseva]

this is exactly how R syntax works