Assignment and Identity Operators

Assignment operators are used to assign values to variables. The basic assignment operator is =, but Python also provides compound assignment operators that combine arithmetic operations with assignment: +=, -=, *=, /=, //=, %=, **=, &=, |=, ^=, <<=, and >>=. These operators provide a concise way to update variables. Identity operators (is, is not) compare the memory locations of two objects to determine if they are the same object, not just equal in value. This is different from equality comparison (==) which checks if values are equal. The 'is' operator returns True if both variables point to the same object, while 'is not' returns True if they point to different objects. For small integers and certain strings, Python uses interning (caching) for optimization, which can make identity comparisons behave unexpectedly if you're not aware of this behavior. Generally, use == for value comparison and 'is' only when you specifically need to check if two references point to the exact same object.