From what I've seen, I'm not sure that the = is necessarily required. I believe that it's there more for convenience than anything else. Dee or anyone else have a bit more of a solid comment?
what mastermind said this thing has been disscoverd before and deezire allready replied to this thing before it's not needed just to make it easier to understand for the coder
^ What Hunter said. On most modules, its not strictly required. It depends which (version of) the editor they used to write the code in the first place. You see the '=' missing a lot in BFME.
Most programmers aren't conscientious by the end of a project. It all starts that way, but when you have the "I want a playable build in a week" commands from above the plan is just to hack the code so it works.
And who wants to go back and make thing *nice* and *easy to read* when the game is working fine...? It's a hard question. At the beginning you follow rules and everything is cool, but then things start to slip. Going and doing this may optimise the code, but in this case if there's an = sign or not, it doesn't optimise ANYTHING.
It just makes it easier to read, but if a couple were missed they were probably added quickly at the end. It's even plausable that a few = were missed, so they hacked it so it would work withou
WTF in the american powerplant?
