It would be confusing and weird if “=” did different things depending on the context.

= is the assignment operator

== is the comparison operator.

the others using = only is probably just to keep things short, and the fact that the context is a lot clearer with another character like < next to the =

>= and <= match the mathematical operators. The question you want to ask is why doesn’t it use = for equality, and the answer is that = is already used for assignment (inherited from C among other languages).

In theory a language could use = for assignment and equality but it might be a bit confusing and error prone. Maybe not though. Someone try it and report back.

My logic was always, if == is equal, then for >= we replace one of the equal signs to denote that it doesn’t have only be equal but can be both.

But that was probably also influenced by languages where == means the value is equal and === means value and type have to be equal for the comparison to be true. If you compare “5” and 5 in those languages, == will be true and === will be false, since one is a string and one is a number.

At the end of the day, those signs are arbitrary conventions. People agree on them meaning something in a specific context, and the same thing can mean different things in different contexts. A in English represents a different sound than A in Spanish, and sometimes even in other dialects of English. Thinking of out like that helped me to keep the conventions of different programming languages apart.

It’s a convention set by early programming languages.

In most C-like languages, if (a = b)... is also a valid comparison. The = (assignment) operation returns the assigned value as a result, which is then converted to a boolean value by the if expression. Consider this Javascript code:

let a = b = 1

1. It first declares the b variable and assigns it the value of the expression 1, which is one.
2. It returns the result of the expression b = 1, which is the assigned value, which is 1.
3. It declares the a variable and assigns the previously returned value, which is 1.

Another example:

let a = 1
let b = 2
let c = 3
console.log(a == b) // prints "false" because the comparison is false
console.log(a = b) // prints 2 because the expression returns the value of the assignment, which is 'b', which is 2

// Using this in an 'if' statement:
if (b = c) { // the result of the assignment is 3, which is converted to a boolean true
    console.log("what")
}

You can’t do the same in Python (it will fail with a syntax error), but it’s better to adhere to convention because it doesn’t hurt anyone, but going against it might confuse programmers who have greater experience with another language. Like I was when I switched from Pascal (which uses = for comparison and := for assignment) to C.

<= is already no mathematical assignment operator, but a comparison operator. Thus there is no need to define e.g. <== for comparing two values.

It’s still a mathematic operator. There’s an entire field of math dedicated to comparisons, and it’s featured heavily in most programming languages. Computer science is a field dedicated to the application of math

It’s all convention coming from older programming languages, particularly C, which comes from programmers wanting shorthand for things like “BRANCH_EQUAL $1 $2 $3” which is shorthand for some binary code.

Python has changed the logical and and or operators to be and and or instead of && and ||.

Pretty sure this is directly inspired by C so I would guess Guido van Rossum (the author of Python) just used what was already common back then. As in, = is assignment operator and == is equality/comparison operator.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_comparison

Imagine saying these operators out loud.

> is “is greater than”

So it makes sense to use >= as “is greater than or equal to”

You’d think = would be “is equal to”, but it’s already used for “set equal to” (i.e., assignment).

So what symbol do we use for “is equal to”? The symbol used in many programming languages is ==, so Python chose to follow that convention.

It’s worth noting that there are other languages that use = as “is equal to”, and use something else for assignment (like := for example). It just comes down to the history of the language and what conventions the original authors decided to use.

If I were to speculate, I’d say it came from the == operator (Boolean equality comparison) and then later, when that was extended to include Boolean less-than-or-equal and greater-than-or-equal, the decision was made to keep them 2 characters long. Either because it was visually cleaner, or just because programmers love being lazy (read: efficient)

@EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted
Careful about “is” and “is not”
These compare identity of objects, which in CPython usually checks if objects are at the same memory address.

This works for some objects like True, False, None and small integer numbers, since they are created as unique objects when the interpreter starts.

Usually you would use == or != for these types of comparison. See below an example where “is” fails comparing two identical float numbers.

I get your point of view, and haven’t thought about it that way before.

As for why it’s like that, my best guess is the sentence I wrote above. Your proposal totally makes sense.