Casting by assigning to the right ...

[Manfred Nowak]

On Tuesday, 14 April 2020 at 13:03:19 UTC, aliak wrote:
> Also, you can make it a generic free function if you want.
[...]
> i.castAssign(s); // cast and assign s

And because the pair of parenthesis can by exchanged by a `=', 
giving
   `i   .castAssign=   s;'
you just evaluated, that there is in addition to  {+, -, *, /, %, 
^^, &, |, ^, <<, >>, >>>, ~} an additional bunch of ops for the 
op-assignment-operator giving the resulting form in regular 
language parlor:
   '.' ident '='

Allowing ident to be an empty string would even include `.=' to 
be recognized as an assignment operator. This is very close to 
the assignment operator in pascal `:='.

What is the better annotation of a coder knowing, that a cast is 
being executed under the hood: `._=' or `:='?