What does “:=” do?

Question

I\'ve seen := used in several code samples, but never with an accompanying explanation. It\'s not exactly possible to google its use without knowing the proper

Answer 1

It's the assignment operator in Pascal and is often used in proofs and pseudo-code. It's the same thing as = in C-dialect languages.

Historically, computer science papers used = for equality comparisons and ← for assignments. Pascal used := to stand in for the hard-to-type left arrow. C went a different direction and instead decided on the = and == operators.