a:class <- b

Usually in strongly typed languages, like C++, the type of a variable comes before the variable, e.g.:

int x = 23 ;  

So x is declared of type int and assignd the value 23.

Now, some languages do things differently, e.g. in julia:

x::Int8 = 1000  

or go :

var i int = 1 ;  

So here is a curious thing we can do with R:

`:<-` <- function(x, y, value){
    cl <- deparse(substitute(y))
    target <- deparse(substitute(x))
    if( !is(value, cl) ) {
        beepr::beep(7)
        stop(sprintf("incompatible, expecting %s", cl ) )
    }
    assign( target, value, parent.frame() )
}

The idea is that we can do something like this:

x  :integer <- 3L  
x  :integer <- "foo"  

It does not work if x does not already exist, which makes this kind of useless:

> x :integer <- 3
Erreur dans x:integer <- 3 : objet 'x' introuvable  

However, if x already exist, it does:

> x <- NULL
> x :integer <- 3L
> x
[1] 3
> x :integer <- "foo"
Erreur dans `:<-`(`*tmp*`, integer, value = "foo") :  
  incompatible, expecting integer

This is not particularly useful. For it to be more useful, we would need the R grammar to recognize a:b <- c and do something meaningful with it.