[tralarpa]

FORTRAN is seven years older than BASIC and uses the equal sign and variables in the same way. Here an excerpt from the 1957 paper by Backus et al.:

"Evaluate the expression on the right of the = sign and make this the value of the variable on the left."

[grumpyprole]

Good point, but IIRC Dijkstra didn't like Fortran either. ALGOL (1958) used ":=" for assignment, as did Pascal some years later.