[bachmeier]

shrug

I've used it. The overloading of the equals sign is something that has never made sense for assignment. (Seriously, it's hard to intentionally come up with dumber notation than x = x+1.) I do use -> sometimes. It's more natural to do the evaluation and then figure out where you're going to store the result (particularly when you're programming).

This is minor as these things go. Definitely not a big deal one way or the other.

[actuator]

If assignment is what we are concerned about, we should introduce something like `x := x + 1`.

[jghn]

why `:=` and not `<-`?

The `<-` in R comes from the APL keyboard, and that glyph is an assignment in APL. It wasn't just some crazy invention from Ross & Robert or even John Chambers.

[_kst_]

Is "x<-3" an assignment to x or a comparison of x to -3?

The same problem led early C (pre-K&R1) to change its compound assignment operators from "=op" to "op=". In early C, "x = -3" assigned the value -3 to x (as it does now), but "x=-3" meant "x = x - 3" (now written "x-=3").

[actuator]

Left side assignment is still used to us, from maths and most other programming languages, so it keeps things familar.

The `:=` has been in use in other langs like MySQL