Sometimes I think it's sad that the most popular programming languages use "=" for assignment rather than ":=" (like Pascal). Equality is a symmetrical relationship: "a equals b" means that a and b are the same thing or have the same value, and this is clearly the same as saying that "b equals a". Assignment isn't like that: putting the value b in a box named a isn't the same as putting the value a in a box named b!—surely an asymmetrical operation deserves an asymmetrical notation? Okay, so it is an extra character, but any decent editor can be configured to save you the keystroke.

I'd like to see the colon-equals assignment symbol more often in math, too. For example, shouldn't we be writing lower indices of summation like this?—

$$\sum_{j:=0}^n f(j)$$

—the rationale being that the text under the sigma isn't asserting that j equals zero, but rather that j is assigned zero as the initial index value of what is, in fact, a for loop:

sum = 0;
for (int j=0; j<=n; j++)
{
    sum += f(j);
}
return sum;