Still looking at individual grass straws instead of looking at the scenery.



It is quite irrelevant what you learned at an early age. Especially since it takes such puny efforts to learn the translation of one word into another word or symbol.

I learned "start" and "slut" (which is Swedish for begin/end - and yes, some forums regularly manages to "helpfully" censor innocent posts...) and by your logic, it would be counter-productive to have to relearn the words as "begin" and "end".

I learned to use a screwdriver at very early age, so why relearn to use a an electric screwdriver and gain access to moment control?

Why learn how to use a jack hammer if it is much easier to just extrapolate my knowledge of a small wooden hammer into the the use of a sledge hammer?

An important factor: We can not grow unless we are willing to learn. Learning to go from BEGIN to { is such a tiny little step that it isn't even relevant to mention it in a comparative study of different languages. Most of the time where there is a 1-to-1 mapping in the two languages, the difference can be ignored.

It is quite often advantageous to learn new things. The majority of the programming I do would be impractical and often not even allowed in Pascal. I can't prove that there is a Pascal compiler if I move to a different target and all code that has been moved between different processor families would have had to be rewritten from scratch.



Just as irrelevant, or possibly aimed as flame bait.

Different syntax for an assign:

LET A = 10
a := 10;
a = 10;
a = b = c = 10;
a <- 10;
a <- b <- 10 -> c;
STORE 10 INTO A
...

is totally irrelevant for the usefulnes of a language, or how hard the language is to read or how hard the language is to use after you have learned it.

But some languages are very much more useful to know.

If people have a problem with assigns in C, it has nothing to do with the symbol = instead of := for the assign, but with the fact that C allows assigns inside expressions, in which case:
"if (a = b) ;" and "if (a == b) ;" are both valid statements, but with very different end results.