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It's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing.

Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choice of = for assignment and == for equality testing won, but of course that's not a choice in a vacuum and it's tied up with a thousand other choices.

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I think parent was alluding to mutability.
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While I'm a big fan of immutable design, it makes some algorithms much more expensive and ultimately DRAM is mutable. And the example we're talking about could be a loop counter!
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