Dave Gurnell wrote at 06/15/2009 04:50 AM:
Changing things now (or in the future) for the sake of a single character would be lots of work for very little gain.
My followup message was worded poorly. I'm not advocating *switching*. I would very much like ":" to be *added* a shorthand or alternative for "#:", while continuing to support "#:". (I appreciate the concern that the language not be bloated with two ways to do it, however, and I'm not sure how to resolve that.)
Describing why I think "#:" is so bad is difficult when there's a wide range of inclinations towards the *visual* (as opposed to, say, the *verbal*). One tack that might work: should argument names visually dominate operation names?
If someone has use of a facility with gaze-tracking, I think you can get at least a CS MS thesis out of this question, and then do your doctoral work on visual/perceptual and cognition aspects of programming language syntax.
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