[fpc-pascal] Re: Feature proposal: function-based assignment operatorst

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:
> > We value backwards compatiblity very high and this is part of it, no 
> > matter whether these c-like operators are considered good or bad...
> 
> What is it about Pascal programmers and their assumption that verbosity 
> is a prerequisite to clarity?

That's an old discussion. Here is the canned answer:

It's simply how the latin alphabet works, a native to the latin alphabet is
trained to read words that consist out of multiple tokens from a limited set.

Not to interpret a sequence of tokens from a large set. It might be
different for Chinese  :-)

However while some writing systems (like many Eastern Asian languages) are
more ideogrammic, it might be dangerous to expand this to the domain of
programming languages, where very small changes can have great consequences. 
(natural languages have a certain mount of redundancy to avoid problems).

Of course it is all reletive. I don't particularly mean to change := to
 " becomes " or so :-)
 
> I, for one, see absolutely nothing wrong with += etc. since it's an 
> unambiguous idiom which came into use decades ago and is now almost 
> universally understood. 

"Universal" in the curly braces world. We are not part of that family.