[selcuka]

> ALGOL decided to stick close to mathematical tradition

And now we have all 3 in Python (=, ==, and :=) which makes me sad.

[Doxin]

Splitting = and := in python is very intentional though, It makes writing bugs like this impossible:

    if is_logged_in=True:
        allow_access()

I've got... opinions on the way python separates statements and expressions, but there's some real benefits to it too.

[selcuka]

Splitting = and := is intentional, but not for the reason you stated. We could have used := for all assignments from the beginning:

    is_logged_in := True

or

    if is_logged_in := True:

I agree that this would require blurring the statement/expression distinction. You can still do that in a weird way, by disguising your assignment as an expression. This is valid:

    (is_logged_in := True)

The reason it was done that way because := was an afterthought, and making it the assignment operator would have introduced a breaking incompatibility. That lead to having 3 different symbols for 2 use cases (assignment and comparison).

[Doxin]

except if := was the default then accidentally typing ":=" instead of "==" would be the easy bug to make.

:= was bolted on after of course, and I think that was a mistake, but no one asked me, nor do I expect anyone to ;P