Yup, using a grave accent as a symbol in this time and age of Unicode is just clueless. It's a symbol usually used as a diacritical mark for letters, like è. It

Yup, using a grave accent as a symbol in this time and age of Unicode is just clueless. It's a symbol usually used as a diacritical mark for letters, like è. It's thus often a "dead key" (a key that awaits the next one because it is expected to be used combined with another), just not on US keyboards. How hard is it to at least consider the general set of Western keyboards before deciding upon these things? Hint: Let programming languages use characters 1) in the ASCII character set and 2) not diacritical marks, and you'll be fine... It's honestly not rocket science. I think it's a programming language designer's responsibility to just know these things in 2018. In the competing .NET Framework, @ is used for raw string literals, as in @"raw string". The diacritical marks ~ and ^ do occur there for bitwise logical operations and ~ in declarations of destructors but I don't think this is optimal. I never really understood why they inherited C++'s destructor syntax to have a semi-obnoxious special symbol just for this particular one case that is used at most once per entire class definition, that is shared with bitwise complement (???), no less... Is it so bad with keywords? Or why not just use "!" as in "not". It would at least make more sense.