if <assignment>:

[maney at pobox.com]

Paul Wright <-$P-W$- at verence.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> My own personal feeling is that this is a moderately common error
> (though think I tend to make it more often in Python than in C, for some
> reason). It might be related to experience, but I also think some people
> just have a blind spot for that error (maybe those of us who grew up
> writing BBC BASIC :-).

It is certainly a nuisance when it's a new idea, especially if you have
been accustomed to write something else for the equality operator. 
Although I never did any formal counting, I'm very certain that I had
trouble with this confusion/typo *much* more frequently during those
times when I was doing a lot of work in some other language that
spelled equality "=" (and of course I'd get the "==" form as an error
in the other langauge as well).  Which isn't a retraction of my
statement that it has been overall a pretty rare error IME.  :-)