@North Bus said:
Languages with the "set" or "let" construct have always amused me. I remember when I was a young programmer and first learned that, in BASIC, "LET X = 2" was the same as "X = 2"... my world was shaken on that day.
With the construct, it always feels as through you are asking the permission of the programming language to modify a variable, rather than simply declaring it such. I truly felt the power of programming when I could say "X = 0" and my will was done.
I would like to ask the permission of the programming language to make this WTF go away, though.
I used to TA for CS101 and CS201 for my college and I can't tell you how many students would have been helped by the LET statement. The idea of assignment always tripped up beginners, it seems so simple when you've been doing it for years, but if you just saw
x = y
sitting on a line without any knowledge of how programming works, maybe just a basic idea of high school mathematics, I could see how some people could be confused, of course those people should come to grips with this quickly or leave the profession (or stay and produce more WTFs for our amusement).