"I do believe that the language should provide both a parallel = and a sequential =. I'm not entirely sure which one should be afforded "official =" status. For the moment, portable code could use "=" or maybe "=s" for sequential and "p=" or something for parallel assignment (it definitely has to be no more than two characters)."
That sounds reasonable. In fact, then = could just be an alias... something like this:
(assign = =p)
And then if you would prefer = to be sequential, you could do this:
(assign = =s)
This would of course clobber other code that expects = to be parallel, but that should be handled by a module/namespace system, so I'm not worried about that.
Side note: maybe we should avoid giving them names that look like emoticons...
