> In Clojure you can do `%1` or `%2` similar to `@1` `@2` in Ruby I very much like the feature itself, esp. for one liners you can come up with on a pry prompt

> In Clojure you can do `%1` or `%2` similar to `@1` `@2` in Ruby I very much like the feature itself, esp. for one liners you can come up with on a pry prompt. What I very much dislike though is the use of @ which is a glorious hack if there is any since currently @ tokenizably resolves to 'instance variable' in many a brain (and @@ to class variable but those should die since class variables can be implemented as instance variables of an instance of Class which is both much more elegant and less prone to corner cases, but I digress). In fact I'd very much be happy to use %1 as a syntax since that would match the "%1" placeholders in strings right away. "%1" in strings, \1 in regex for backrefs, $1 for regex groups, {%1} in blocks somehow works as a metapattern, but reusing @1 vs @myvar is such a mismatch that it brings a terrible cognitive dissonance (just see e.g how in [1, 2, 3].each { @1 + @I } both @ have different scopes!). I can see the argument coming (if it did not already happen) that "OMG this is going to special case stuff in the parser so that the % method can be separate from this new syntax! plus this may break existing code!" to which I reply %1 won't ever appear in the same place in the AST as a modulo operator with a right hand integer argument and this is your job as a language implementor to make the dev job easy, and it's crackpot anyway since that will already special case the @ syntax in the parser. Simple is hard, bailing on implementing the simple solution as a language implementor even if it's internally tough is a copout.