From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2009-02-24T09:33:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Nexus Programming Language

Eric Promislow wrote:
> No one's mentioned that the earliest versions of VisiCalc
> used left-to-right precendence.  I suspect this was due to
> the need to shoehorn as much as possible into the tiny
> footprints of the time, and not any attempt to promote
> a new visionary approach to arithmetic.


Having been messing around with my own little language, it was much 
easier to make all binary operators equal and apply them left-to-right. 
It also makes it easy to have arbitrary binary operators, because they 
are all treated the same.


> Also at OSCON a few years ago Damian Conway, speaking from
> personal experience, claimed that any modern language that
> doesn't use a single '=' to indicate assignment is doomed to
> failure.  Having been on the wrong end of that argument
> I wouldn't hesitate to agree.

In my estimation, assignment is performed more often than equality, so I 
agree I'd rather have that be a single keypress.

-Justin