Re: vote on assignments as expressions

Mark Hahn wrote:

> This is actually an argument to
> use choice e ( ":=" ), since it looks the most like a normal assignment and
> will cause the least readability problem if they do this.

Paul Prescod wrote:

> I almost think I would purposely use it everywhere, for two reasons:
>
>   1) consistency between different contexts
>
>   2) because it has always irritated me that programming languages use
> "==" to mean what mathematicians call "=" and "=" to mean something that
> mathematicians rarely do.

I would be tempted to make the jump and use it as an alternative
assignment op too, depending on context.

Here is also a nice side effect at the console:

>>> b=2
>>> a=b        # assign
>>> a          # show
2
>>> c:=b       # assign and show
2

For these 2 reasons, I support "a:=b" as expression assignment, with 2 votes.

  Laurent Dube