> That awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a

> That awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a beginner. I'll probably have to thank one of my highschool math teachers for inadvertently helping me skip this phase altogether then :) He always pestered us to use the "equivalence" operators ⇔ or ≡ (the latter mostly for geometry stuff), and only use the regular equal when you had unambiguous contexts like "Let f(x) = x + 2" or "if x = 5". At the same time I was learning programming (with C++ as my first language...), and I could easily see "=" as being for assignment, since in other contexts you either used something more fancy (like ⇔ or ≡ in math, and "==" in code) or you used explaining words like "let" or "if" to clarify meaning. Though I think it took me a while to get things like `while (x = getch()) { ... }` :)