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Comment by danidiaz | Hacker News Reader

In pure functional programming, = = = (bindings are unmodifiable, and it's easier to substitute equals for equals).

The assignment operator should have been <- or something other than = from the beginning. I wonder if there was some discussion about that, back in the day?

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Back in the day a large proportion of languages used = for equality and something else for assignment. That something else might have been e.g.

* := (Algol-style :=, not Go-style).

* A non-ASCII arrow character (surprisingly not always a <- 1, but sometimes 1 -> a)

* A keyword (SET a TO 1)

So yes, there was certainly a lot of discussion about it, but in the end this is also just a minor design detail. It's just an accident of history that we ended up with =- as-assignment being the norm.

as it was in algol day. :=

Or in many functional languages you might say something like

    a <- 5

Which is quite intuitive.

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