Indeed, anyone can also write code over-abusing lambdas in a functional language, but lambdas are also quite useful in the majority of cases. On the other hand,

Indeed, anyone can also write code over-abusing lambdas in a functional language, but lambdas are also quite useful in the majority of cases. On the other hand, can you point out a single situation where swapping int and typedef in a type definition brings anything good? Likewise, in your example, I doubt that this could bring anything. Is there a practical obfuscation method based on that quirk in Rust, or a reason for keeping it in the syntax? I cannot tell, but maybe you can? Overall, the problem that I have with this is not that it is silly, it is that it makes it harder to understand and maintain. In some cases, it requires active engineering to fix the issue, but the language should be designed so that most of these problems are taken care of by design. Also, many people seem to enjoy the fact the C can be bent that way. I don't mean to remove that from them, I just think that for system programming, it should be less permissive. Perhaps a 'strict mode' could be devised, not at the syntax level like in javascript (which I suppose couldn't be avoided), but as compiler flag (like the c++ people did it).