Hardly arbitary (I have fond memories of several languages that used :=).
But all the ones I know of use it for ordinary assignment. We'd be having two kinds of assignment, and there's no prior art to suggest to suggest which should be = and which :=. That's the "arbitrary" part. The only language I can remember seeing which had two kinds of assignment was Simula, which had := for value assignment and :- for reference assignment (or was it the other way around? :-) I always thought that was kind of weird. Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+