Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Dar Scott]

On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 06:33 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Frank Leahy wrote:
>
>> And my bet still stands -- I'm willing to bet $20 that the code to
>> parse "x = 1" is already in place, but commented out in the RR engine
>> for historical reasons.
>
> You may have just lost $20: "=" is already an operator in Transcript 
> (used
> as in Pascal, for comparison).
>
> When cavemen first invented programming languages, the big moment of 
> d'oh!
> was after they'd proudly implemted "=" as an assignment operator only 
> to
> realize they'd forgotten comparison.

But to be fair, as pointed out, the = can be overloaded here.

In C every statement is an expression, so there is a problem, but in 
context in some similar language, = can mean two things.

Dar Scott