Pascal uses := for assignment and = for comparison. It took about 5 minutes to get used to this notation. I rather like it...
Yup. Faster than to get used to than = and ==, and less prone to unnoticed errors.
The clearest assignment operator is, of course ← as in "x ← x + 1". Bonus points for recognising which language got that right many decades ago
As long as you don't have to give it a three-fingered salute, who cares whether one or two characters has to be typed. We're not using ASR33s anymore, are we mechatrommer?.
Ahh APL, of which I have fond memories from my early 1980s mainframe days!
Here's a great sight for playing with APL, such an expressive language, here's the definition of a function to calculate the average of any number of integers:
avg ← { (+ / ⍵) ÷ ⍴ ⍵ }
I wasn't thinking of APL, since I'm not a fan and it hasn't been very influential. By and large APL seems to be a mistake carried through to perfection. There is one thing that APL did get right, the difference between "-3" and "¯3". But that is "correcting" a standard quirk with maths notation that requires every generation to learn about that mistake.
Well given how unreceptive, even hostile, many can be, to new languages and language ideas, radical departures from convention, it's no surprise that APL isn't appreciated as much as it could be. Most people are very conservative even in this day and age, they don't like change generally, not if it means
they have to change and programming languages are particularly prone to this.
The degree to which a language is "influential" isn't wholly attributable to the languages innate qualities, it is often more of a reflection of other factors. APL was not initially anything to even do with computers, it was an exercise in developing a notation for teaching certain aspects of mathematics, only later did it dawn on them that it could be used for a language.
Iverson received a Turning Award for his work on notation, he showed how
thought itself is often directed/restrained, even sometimes blinkered by, notation.
Consider too:
APL has formed the basis of, or influenced, the following languages:[citation needed]
A and A+, an alternative APL, the latter with graphical extensions.
FP, a functional programming language.
Ivy, an interpreter for an APL-like language developed by Rob Pike, and which uses ASCII as input.[46]
J, which was also designed by Iverson, and which uses ASCII with digraphs instead of special symbols.[7]
K, a proprietary variant of APL developed by Arthur Whitney.[8]
MATLAB, a numerical computation tool.[6]
Nial, a high-level array programming language with a functional programming notation.
Polymorphic Programming Language, an interactive, extensible language with a similar base language.
S, a statistical programming language (usually now seen in the open-source version known as R).
Speakeasy, a numerical computing interactive environment.
Wolfram Language, the programming language of Mathematica.[47]
So, MATLAB
and Mathematica...
No, I was thinking of a language that has been extremely influential and is better than quite a few of its successors. That language's syntax can be easily described with examples on a single sheet of A4 paper. Very few languages manage anything close.
No idea, you'll have to tell me!