Curious assignment behaviour

[John W. Baxter]

In article <ts9gn1bdf1b7f3 at news.supernews.com>, John Roth
<johnroth at ameritech.net> wrote:

> and its the reason that
> Algol chose ":=" as the assignment operator, with Pascal following
> in that path.

Which I prefer, even though:  

I never used a keyboard on which : and = used the same state of the
shift key.  (I used a few which were the reverse of what we--on US
keyboards--now expect, with : unshifted and = shifted.)

Thus (on current US keyboards), one sees occasional ;= and :+ (which
fortunately aren't symbols of many languages and generally lead to
syntax errors).

  --John