As utomius has mentioned , in terms of natural language , you ' ve also added a conjunction to describe the statement is plain english . if x is equal five , x assign to fourThe following is also valid python if x is 5 x 4 Which is even closer to the sentence you wrote . <| sep |> At one point he made some comment on twitter about research for book 3 and it made me think that he was probably building out history and culture for the new parts of the world that will be visited . Stuff like that was part of what made the first two books so good you don ' t just see other parts of the world and stuff happens , but things are different in other parts of the world they have different traditions and belief systems , and they all link together in some way to the broader story of the world , and have their own reasons why they diverged and evolved into what they are now .