Very true. The core Avail language uses “_=_” for comparison, “_:_” to declare a variable, “_:=_” got assignment, and “_::=_” for constants (think “final”). It also has “_:_:=_” for the case when you want to declare a variable of a general type, but initialize it with something more specific (say a counter that starts at 1).

But yes. There’s a lot of deeply evil things that can be done in Avail, right down to the lexical scanning. Like forbidding certain variable names, or manufacturing a run of tokens every time a certain emoji is encountered. There are also a lot of safeties, like sealing methods to prevent someone overriding “_+_” for [3’s type, 4’s type]->9’s type.

Oh, and writing “x = x + 1;” as a statement will be flagged as a syntax error, because it would produce a Boolean value which is not allowed to be silently discarded like in Java or C. “Discard:_” makes these rarely needed situations absolutely obvious.