> No matter how much we pretend, the equal sign (=) leaks through, and that in itself creates infinite confusion in people who pretend to get it. I have a feel

> No matter how much we pretend, the equal sign (=) leaks through, and that in itself creates infinite confusion in people who pretend to get it. I have a feeling that this issue might be amplified by the facts that 1. many US-American students are monolingual. 2. I have observed that many native English speakers are less interested in their own language than native speakers of other languages for their mother tongue. For 1: If you are used to learn multiple (natural) languages, you are very used to the fact that (nearly) identical words can have very different meanings in different languages (false friends). Examples: sensible [en] vs sensibel [de] ("sensitive" in English) bite [en] vs bite [fr] (a vulgar word) So for me there is nothing surprising about the fact that "=" means different things in mathematics vs programming languages that use = as an assignment operator. For 2: There exist quite a lot of English words that can have very different meanings depending on the context (arbitrary example: "left" can both mean a direction, and be the simple past and past participle of "to leave"). So what is so difficult about the fact that = means something different in a C/C++/Java/C#/Python program than in a math equation?