Note: The attached image is a screenshot of page 31 of Dr. Charles Severance’s book, Python for Everybody: Exploring Data Using Python 3 (2024-01-01 Revision).
I thought = was a mathematical operator, not a logical operator; why does Python use
= instead of ==, or
<= instead of <==, or
!= instead of !==?
Thanks in advance for any clarification. I would have posted this in the help forums of FreeCodeCamp, but I wasn’t sure if this question was too…unspecified(?) for that domain.
Cheers!
Edit: I think I get it now! Thanks so much to everyone for helping, and @[email protected] and @[email protected] in particular! ^_^
Rust does an interesting thing in this regard. It does still have
==for checking if two values are equal, but well, it actually doesn’t have a traditional assignment operator. Instead, it has a unification operator, which programmers usually call “pattern matching”.And then you can use pattern matching for what’s effectively an assignment and to some degree also for equivalence comparison.
See a few examples here: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=1268682eb8642af925db9a499a6d587a
It doesn’t still have a traditional assignment operator. You can assign values to mutable variables.
Also I would say let-binds are still pretty much assignment; they just support destructuring. Plenty of languages support that to some extent (JavaScript for example) and you wouldn’t say they don’t have assignment.
I don’t think it affects the ability to overload
=anyway. I think there aren’t any situations in Rust where it would be ambiguous which one you meant. Certainly none of the examples you gave compile with both=and==. Maybe there’s some obscure case we haven’t thought of.This reminds me on the niche tool in Mathematica I’ve been using, which has four different assignment oparators for that purpose.