They mention this on in "Prior Art" https://peps.python.org/pep-0736/#prior-art https://peps.python.org/pep-0736/#prior-art And it just makes sense to do it th

They mention this on in "Prior Art" https://peps.python.org/pep-0736/#prior-art https://peps.python.org/pep-0736/#prior-art And it just makes sense to do it this way as a) it is basically the same as in ruby, except that the long form in ruby uses a colon and python uses an equals sign b) this syntax already exists in python for f-strings But I agree x= looks a bit "unfinished" and erroneous while :x does not IMO, though I'm looking forward to do fewer keypresses if this gets released.