Is There a Technical Difference Between "=" and "<-"

Is there a technical difference between = and -

Yes there is. This is what the help page of '=' says:

The operators <- and = assign into the
environment in which they are
evaluated. The operator <- can be used
anywhere, whereas the operator = is
only allowed at the top level (e.g.,
in the complete expression typed at
the command prompt) or as one of the
subexpressions in a braced list of
expressions.

With "can be used" the help file means assigning an object here. In a function call you can't assign an object with = because = means assigning arguments there.

Basically, if you use <- then you assign a variable that you will be able to use in your current environment. For example, consider:

matrix(1,nrow=2)

This just makes a 2 row matrix. Now consider:

matrix(1,nrow<-2)

This also gives you a two row matrix, but now we also have an object called nrow which evaluates to 2! What happened is that in the second use we didn't assign the argument nrow 2, we assigned an object nrow 2 and send that to the second argument of matrix, which happens to be nrow.

Edit:

As for the edited questions. Both are the same. The use of = or <- can cause a lot of discussion as to which one is best. Many style guides advocate <- and I agree with that, but do keep spaces around <- assignments or they can become quite hard to interpret. If you don't use spaces (you should, except on twitter), I prefer =, and never use ->!

But really it doesn't matter what you use as long as you are consistent in your choice. Using = on one line and <- on the next results in very ugly code.

What is the difference between = and == in R?

It depends on context as to what = means. == is always for testing equality.

= can be

1. in most cases used as a drop-in replacement for <-, the assignment operator.

   > x = 10
   > x
   [1] 10
   

2. used as the separator for key-value pairs used to assign values to arguments in function calls.

   rnorm(n = 10, mean = 5, sd = 2)
   

Because of 2. above, = can't be used as a drop-in replacement for <- in all situations. Consider

> rnorm(N <- 10, mean = 5, sd = 2)
 [1] 4.893132 4.572640 3.801045 3.646863 4.522483 4.881694 6.710255 6.314024
 [9] 2.268258 9.387091
> rnorm(N = 10, mean = 5, sd = 2)
Error in rnorm(N = 10, mean = 5, sd = 2) : unused argument (N = 10)
> N
[1] 10

Now some would consider rnorm(N <- 10, mean = 5, sd = 2) poor programming, but it is valid and you need to be aware of the differences between = and <- for assignment.

== is always used for equality testing:

> set.seed(10)
> logi <- sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 10, replace = TRUE)
> logi
 [1] FALSE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE
> logi == TRUE
 [1] FALSE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE
> seq.int(1, 10) == 5L
 [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

Do be careful with == too however, as it really means exactly equal to and on a computer where floating point operations are involved you may not get the answer you were expecting. For example, from ?'==':

> x1 <- 0.5 - 0.3
> x2 <- 0.3 - 0.1
> x1 == x2                           # FALSE on most machines
[1] FALSE
> identical(all.equal(x1, x2), TRUE) # TRUE everywhere
[1] TRUE

where all.equal() tests for equality allowing for a little bit of fuzziness due to loss of precision/floating point operations.

What's the difference between `=` and `-` in R?

From here:

The operators <- and = assign into the environment in which they are evaluated. The operator <- can be used anywhere, whereas the operator = is only allowed at the top level (e.g., in the complete expression typed at the command prompt) or as one of the subexpressions in a braced list of expressions.

Difference between := and = operators in Go

Only = is the assignment operator.

:= is a part of the syntax of the short variable declaration clause.

There are some rules though. See this other answer for more details.

What is the difference between += and =+ C assignment operators

In modern C, or even moderately ancient C, += is a compound assignment operator, and =+ is parsed as two separate tokens. = and +. Punctuation tokens are allowed to be adjacent.

So if you write:

x += y;

it's equivalent to

x = x + y;

except that x is only evaluated once (which can matter if it's a more complicated expression).

If you write:

x =+ y;

then it's parsed as

x = + y;

and the + is a unary plus operator.

Very early versions of C (around the mid 1970s, before the publication of K&R1 in 1978) used different symbols for compound assignments. Where modern C uses +=, early C used =+. Early C had no unary + operator, but it did have a unary - operator, and the use of =- caused problems; programmers would write x=-y intending it to mean x = -y, but it was silently interpreted as x =- y. The language was changed some time between 1975 and 1978 to avoid that problem. As late as 1999, I worked with a compiler (VAXC on VMS) that would warn about an ambiguous use of =-, but would use the older meaning. That shouldn't be a concern now unless you're a hobbyist playing with some very old software and/or hardware.

(A 1975 C Reference Manual shows the old =-, =+, et al forms of the compound assignment operators. The first edition of The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, published in 1978, shows the modern -=, +=, et al, but mentions the older forms under "Anachronisms".)

The difference between += and =+

a += b is short-hand for a = a + b (though note that the expression a will only be evaluated once.)

a =+ b is a = (+b), i.e. assigning the unary + of b to a.

Examples:

int a = 15;
int b = -5;

a += b; // a is now 10
a =+ b; // a is now -5

What is the difference between == and === in Verilog?

Some data types in Verilog, such as reg, are 4-state. This means that each bit can be one of 4 values: 0,1,x,z.

With the "case equality" operator, ===, x's are compared, and the result is 1.

With ==, the result of the comparison is not 0, as you stated; rather, the result is x, according to the IEEE Std (1800-2009), section 11.4.5 "Equality operators":

For the logical equality and logical
inequality operators (== and !=), if,
due to unknown or high-impedance bits
in the operands, the relation is
ambiguous, then the result shall be a
1-bit unknown value (x).

What is the difference between ' and in JavaScript?

They are equivalent for all intents and purposes. If you want to use either one inside a string, it is a good idea to use the other one to create the string, as you noted. Other than that, it's all the same.

What are the differences between = and - assignment operators?

What are the differences between the assignment operators = and <- in R?

As your example shows, = and <- have slightly different operator precedence (which determines the order of evaluation when they are mixed in the same expression). In fact, ?Syntax in R gives the following operator precedence table, from highest to lowest:

…
‘-> ->>’           rightwards assignment
‘<- <<-’           assignment (right to left)
‘=’                assignment (right to left)
…

But is this the only difference?

Since you were asking about the assignment operators: yes, that is the only difference. However, you would be forgiven for believing otherwise. Even the R documentation of ?assignOps claims that there are more differences:

The operator <- can be used anywhere,
whereas the operator = is only allowed at the top level (e.g.,
in the complete expression typed at the command prompt) or as one
of the subexpressions in a braced list of expressions.

Let’s not put too fine a point on it: the R documentation is wrong. This is easy to show: we just need to find a counter-example of the = operator that isn’t (a) at the top level, nor (b) a subexpression in a braced list of expressions (i.e. {…; …}). — Without further ado:

x
# Error: object 'x' not found
sum((x = 1), 2)
# [1] 3
x
# [1] 1

Clearly we’ve performed an assignment, using =, outside of contexts (a) and (b). So, why has the documentation of a core R language feature been wrong for decades?

It’s because in R’s syntax the symbol = has two distinct meanings that get routinely conflated (even by experts, including in the documentation cited above):

1. The first meaning is as an assignment operator. This is all we’ve talked about so far.
2. The second meaning isn’t an operator but rather a syntax token that signals named argument passing in a function call. Unlike the = operator it performs no action at runtime, it merely changes the way an expression is parsed.

So how does R decide whether a given usage of = refers to the operator or to named argument passing? Let’s see.

In any piece of code of the general form …

‹function_name›(‹argname› = ‹value›, …)
‹function_name›(‹args›, ‹argname› = ‹value›, …)

… the = is the token that defines named argument passing: it is not the assignment operator. Furthermore, = is entirely forbidden in some syntactic contexts:

if (‹var› = ‹value›) …
while (‹var› = ‹value›) …
for (‹var› = ‹value› in ‹value2›) …
for (‹var1› in ‹var2› = ‹value›) …

Any of these will raise an error “unexpected '=' in ‹bla›”.

In any other context, = refers to the assignment operator call. In particular, merely putting parentheses around the subexpression makes any of the above (a) valid, and (b) an assignment. For instance, the following performs assignment:

median((x = 1 : 10))

But also:

if (! (nf = length(from))) return()

_{Now you might object that such code is atrocious (and you may be right). But I took this code from the base::file.copy function (replacing <- with =) — it’s a pervasive pattern in much of the core R codebase.}

The original explanation by John Chambers, which the the R documentation is probably based on, actually explains this correctly:

[= assignment is] allowed in only two places in the grammar: at the top level (as a complete program or user-typed expression); and when isolated from surrounding logical structure, by braces or an extra pair of parentheses.

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In sum, by default the operators <- and = do the same thing. But either of them can be overridden separately to change its behaviour. By contrast, <- and -> (left-to-right assignment), though syntactically distinct, always call the same function. Overriding one also overrides the other. Knowing this is rarely practical but it can be used for some fun shenanigans.

What is the difference between != and operators?

From the manual:

Note: The != operator is converted to <> in the parser stage. It is not possible to implement != and <> operators that do different things.

So no, there is no difference between the two.

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