Assignment (computer Science) - Notation

Notation

Common textual representations of the assignment include an equals sign (=) and colon-equals (:=). These two forms are typical of programming languages that classify assignment as an infix operator.

variable = expression	BASIC, Bourne shell, C (and many of its descendants), Fortran, Java, PL/I, Python, R, Windows PowerShell...
variable := expression	ALGOL, Simula, Algol68, Algol W, CPL, BCPL, Pascal, Mary, Modula, Ada, Smalltalk, Eiffel,, Modula-2, Modula-2+, Oberon, Modula-3, Dylan, Seed7, Io

Other possibilities include a left arrow or a keyword, though there are other, rarer, variants:

variable << expression	Magik
variable <- expression	OCaml, R, S
variable <<- expression	R
variable ← expression	APL
variable =: expression	J
LET variable = expression	BASIC
set variable to expression	AppleScript
set variable = expression	C shell
Set-Variable variable (expression)	Windows PowerShell
val variable = expression	ML
variable : expression	Macsyma, Maxima
var variable expression	mIRC scripting language

Some platforms put the expression on the left and the variable on the right:

MOVE expression TO variable	COBOL
expression → variable	TI-BASIC, Casio BASIC
expression -> variable	R

Some expression-oriented languages, such as Lisp and Tcl, uniformly use prefix syntax for all statements, including assignment.

(setf variable expression)	Common Lisp
(set! variable expression)	Scheme
set variable expression	Tcl