Yes, the use of bare "=" for assignment is one of the Great Mistakes of Computing, right up there with null references and zero-terminated strings. There have

Yes, the use of bare "=" for assignment is one of the Great Mistakes of Computing, right up there with null references and zero-terminated strings. There have certainly been languages that have used other operators for assignment, such as ":=" or my own favorite, "<-", but somehow they have never caught on. "=" was good enough for Fortran in 1956, by god -- it's still good enough 60 years later!