This comment makes me feel a little bit sad. It doesn't take too much breadth of knowledge to recognize those all as different kinds of literal syntax, even if

This comment makes me feel a little bit sad. It doesn't take too much breadth of knowledge to recognize those all as different kinds of literal syntax, even if you don't know the exact details. #(...) for some sort of collection, probably a list or vector, $a and #a for different kinds of atomic value, even if it's hard to guess whether any one of them represents a symbol, a character literal, a perl-style variable reference, or something else. If such prosaic syntax is really so unfamiliar-looking nowadays, it really speaks to a major gap in how people are taught about programming. Comparable to if it were common for younger mechanical engineers to not even recognize a slide rule when they see one.