I can remember my pascal instructor at UMASS Boston in 1975 (?) introducing us to the ':=' operator.  He said that when we read it or use it to say 'gets the value'.  So x:=5 reads x gets the value of 5.  It was clear that way.  Easy to understand.   I saw it again in lotus notes formula language, then again in Java, and other languages also.  Once understood, any symbol could possibly represent the action of assigning a value.  In 20 years of programming in Verizon, I can't remember any bugs resulting from ':='