Aliases for `=` and `==`

I am still not sure what the purpose of this exercise is — the pattern is problematic only if it is a bug, and presumably it isn’t, for any package with decent test coverage.

Generally there is a trade-off between languages protecting users from mistakes like this (via type checks, making certain syntaxes error, etc) and having terse syntax. Though this is not made very explicit, Julia is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: ambiguous syntax is usually an error, but other than that the language does not try to second-guess the programmer.

I happen to like Julia this way, but I understand that reasonable people can have a different preference about this. It’s just that, as @dlfivefifty suggested, surface syntax is very unlikely to change in Julia.