Re: Where did /= come from?

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Matthew Baulch" <matt@greenroom.com.au> wrote in message news:<pan.2002.11.07.06.50.35.988084@greenroom.com.au>...

> I'm not advocating C when I say this, but != makes far more sense than /=
> lexically speaking. In C, the Negative of a bool is retrieved with !foo.

In C, that's a very true statement, for both the reason you mention,
and because "/=" is actually a valid shortcut division operator, as I
recently discovered to my sorrow.

In Ada, it is *not* a true statement.

> In Ada, not foo. So I believe that K&R got it right using the != operator
> for 'not equal'. Ada on the other hand doesn't use the ! operator and "not
> equal" is too clumsy so it could be far worse than '/='.

K&R certianly got it right for C. However, that decision was based on
a rotten foundation of using unnessecarily terse notation for the
concept of "not", for allowing a shortcut "division back into"
operator, and for allowing assignments to be value returning
statements themselves.

As you point out, Ada's operator is just fine for Ada.