You're right, I just don't care for the author's notes on language design because they're all on syntax design, which is an impossible task to do in morsels wit

You're right, I just don't care for the author's notes on language design because they're all on syntax design, which is an impossible task to do in morsels without knowing anything about the rest of the language or how it is supposed to work. I do prefer postfix because I think it flows very nicely "this is-a thing assigned-to that" is nicer than "thing called this assigned-to that." In terms of the impact on the language, optional postfix annotation makes it a bit trickier if you want to make the identifier optional, and in languages that support it you tend to see special syntax to deal with that case (which breaks the author's fetish for self consistency). Personally I think ordering of the trio of "alias" "thing" "value" should be consistent across the language, which extends far past variable assignment, and any one of the trio can be left out.