Why Does "=" Mean Assignment?ALGOL didn’t have a special operator for initialization. Rather, you created the variable with the type, and then later used an operator to assign to it. You could do integer x; x := 5;, but you couldn’t do integer x := 5;. This makes FORTRAN the only one that used = for any kind of assignment, so would seem the right candidate for modern usage. But we know that C descends from ALGOL, which means
