One of the good things about not using the "=" operator is that you cannot accidentally turn a comparison into an assignment, a feature that is a common cause of errors in other languages that do support it. By adding a completely different character to the operator it is not very likely to cause bugs, compared to just forgetting to type that second =
Is it really that common? I made this typo a few times in my life. It was corrected every time before the program actually run because the compiler warned me about it. I don't see how you can make this mistake if you're not aggressively trying (by turning off warnings for example).
