In matlab, the = sign is an assignment operator. I think it is really common because load/compute/store is what the hardware does, and so languages tend to be built around computing a value and then assigning it.

You could, I guess, in any language that allows operator overloading (Python would be a good one) define operators that actually return a function for computation, guess. This just seems like a really complicated way of defining a function, though.

Or possible a template library like Eigen could be thought of in terms of “building a computation.” Maybe CUDA has something like this? I’m not sure, at all.

An aspect for my case specifically, which is probably not a coincidence, is that I usually work with Electrical Engineering students. They’ll typically have seen some very light Verilog in some of their intro classes. I’m definitely not a Verilog expert, but you can use it to define combinatorial circuits—in that case you are literally describing the wires and gates that the computation flows through, so the left hand side does change based on the right hand side, continuously. At least until you write to a clocked register. And of course in a real circuit, there’d be some signal propagation time…