Other thoughts:
- Although I agree that unfamiliar syntax is detrimental to learnability, I argued in another thread that
.awaitfeels more uniquely weird for existing Rust experts (who have already internalized the other unique points of Rust's syntax) than it would for newbies (for whom it would be one of many unfamiliar things). - Using non-ASCII characters would come across to newbies as extremely weird. Which is arguably a 'bad thing' to some extent, in that programming culture is very English-focused to the point of potentially making native speakers of other languages feel second-class. But that's how it is.
- Indeed, I'm pretty sure the post you linked that suggested it was made in jest, considering its wording (though that doesn't necessarily mean the idea is actually bad).
- Although
¡awaitin particular hasn't been extensively considered, it falls under the same category as@awaitand#await, which the "final proposal" blog post addresses:
We consider the most viable of these syntaxes the space await syntax. Other choices (like “
expression@await” or “expression#await”) suffer from too much from the “line noise” problem and we strongly prefer to avoid introducing new meanings to punctuation characters for this purpose.