[Paul Moore]
the next question will likely be "so why does = exist at all?"
[Greg Ewing
And if we decide to make ':=' the official assigment operator and deprectate '=', the next question will be "Why do we have '==' instead of '='?"
Which would be a fine question! In Python's very early days, it didn't have "==" at all: plain "=" was used for both assignment and equality testing.
From the HISTORY file:
""" New features in 0.9.6: ... - '==' is now the only equality operator; "../demo/scripts/eqfix.py" is a script that fixes old Python modules """ That script crawled a source tree and replaced instances of "=" used for equality testing with the new-fangled "==". We can obviously do something similar to replace instances of "=" used for assignment when that's removed, and I'm sure nobody will complain about that either ;-)