Post Assignment
A while back, I designed a domain specific language. It combines the good of APL, C, Pascal and SQL. For example, the token ‘=‘ is not used, ‘:=‘ is the assign-token and ‘==‘ is the equal-token. Like C, it uses only ASCII characters and, like APL, it has a minimalistic, mathematical notation. There is no muli- or list-assign, like in Python and Perl, eventhough code like this: ‘(a,b,c) := (b,c,3);‘ just looks so cool and intuitive. But, it did not fit the syntax, it would make it hard to parse (both for humans and for the LR parser) and most of all it went against the minimalisticity. Than I came up with ‘=:‘, the post-assignment operator. It took me but five minutes to implement. It is a regular assignment but returns the old lvalue. For example ‘a =: 3;‘ would assign ‘3‘ to ‘a‘ and return what ever value was in ‘a‘ before. Post-assignment; analogous to the post-increment from C. IMHO, It makes the above shift even more elegant to read: ‘a =: b =: c =: 3;‘. It was love at first sight! However, the smartest person I know (and first programmer in this language) did not see the need for this opperator and neither did anyone else. So I swallowed my pride and removed the ten odd LOCs. I cried myself to sleep that night.
