Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Taniwha 204 days ago
C originally had =+ and =- (upto and including Unix V6) - they were ambiguous (a=-b means a= -b? or a = a-b?) and replaced by +=/-=

The original structs were pretty bad too - field names had their own address space and could sort of be used with any pointer which sort of allowed you to make tacky unions) we didn't get a real type system until the late 80s
2 comments
adrian_b 203 days ago
ALGOL 68 had "=" for equality and ":=" for assignment, like ALGOL 60.

Therefore the operation with assignment operators were like "+:=".

The initial syntax of C was indeed weird and it was caused by the way how their original parser in their first C compiler happened to be written and rewritten, the later form of the assignment operators was closer to their source from ALGOL 68.

link
ErikCorry 203 days ago
Yeah if you ever wondered why the fields in a lot of Posix APIs have names with prefixes like tm_sec and tm_usec it's because of this misfeature of early C.
link