jashkenas/coffee-script — Issue #1795: Alternative keyword for assignment operation
Author: jussiry
Created: 2011-10-23 06:51:53+00:00
State: open

I'm a big fan of literate programming, and love the fact that CS:s allows us to use keywords like ```is``` and ```unless``` to make the code look more like natural language. Something i'v been thinking recently, is what could be a good keyword for assignment operation? I'm not a native English speaker, but here's my reasoning on the issue.

The logical option would of course be 'assign', but you can't really say ```foo assign 123```, since the correct way to use the word would be to to say ```assign 123 to foo```.

The best alternative i can think of, would be 'becomes'. ```foo becomes 123```. Sounds good to me. But assignment operation is probably the most common operation in CS, so writing 'becomes' everywhere would be very tedious. So we could shorten it to just 'be'? To my ear, it still contains the main semantic message of assignment operation.

```
foo be 123
bar be "pub"
baz be bar unless qux is angry
```

What do you think, does this sound completely crazy to native speakers?