> The elephant in the room is that many languages have adopted or have been influenced by the C language's miserable practices of ending a statement with a semicolon, and using the equals sign as an assignment operator. Both of these practices break with conventional usages to no discernible advantage.
The convention of = stems from mathematics and using it to assign input to variables there. Algebra probably being the first to use it about 1000 years ago.
Assignments are pretty unmathematical since they represent memory operations and (usually) allow for mutation.
Wirth chose := in Pascal for a reason (with the comparison operator begin = instead of == there which is at least closer to the mathematical = operator).
Comments
> The elephant in the room is that many languages have adopted or have been influenced by the C language's miserable practices of ending a statement with a semicolon, and using the equals sign as an assignment operator. Both of these practices break with conventional usages to no discernible advantage.
The convention of = stems from mathematics and using it to assign input to variables there. Algebra probably being the first to use it about 1000 years ago.
Assignments != Equation
Assignments are pretty unmathematical since they represent memory operations and (usually) allow for mutation.
Wirth chose := in Pascal for a reason (with the comparison operator begin = instead of == there which is at least closer to the mathematical = operator).