On Jun 20, 2005, at 3:41 PM, Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> Pascal has := for assignment and = for booleans, but I think the  
> general
> consensus is that assignment happens more often than equality  
> checking, so
> it makes sense that it gets the shorter symbol.

I think Eiffel has the same convention.  For the most part I like
the language features that ruby has cherry-picked from the rest of
the language community but on this point I think I would prefer := for
assignment.  You could keep == for comparison and then the single =  
wouldn't
be valid or confused with either!

The = is shorter than := argument isn't too convincing for me despite  
the
fact that assignment is more common.  I think the debugging time far  
outweighs
any difference in number of characters.


Gary Wright