When I learnt programming, i was confused by x=x+1;

After I understood what it really meant, I wondered why they didn’t use some other symbol to capture this semantic. Say something like x <- x+1 ; Which implies assignment rather than equality - That way this would be unambiguous and I feel is more clear. I now guess the choice of using ‘=‘ was probably an attempt at making a (compromised) choice given the limited symbols that were available back when High level languages were first written?