this operator is great. the number of times i've tried to use an assignment in a while loop thinking i was back in c++ is at least 5. needing to have a variable assigned in a condition instead of performing the update at the beginning or the bottom of the loop is more correct since it shouldn't be part of the block's body, in my opinion. bless up. and it's especially needed since we don't have the for loop (assignment,condition,update) block in python.