> There are some syntactic quirks that don't convey any obvious benefit, like the use of '>' to indicate a return type. [...] why not use the much more common '

> There are some syntactic quirks that don't convey any obvious benefit, like the use of '>' to indicate a return type. [...] why not use the much more common ':' or even '->'? Agreed. New languages should use similar conventions to popular existing languages, for the sake of familiarity, unless there are obvious benefits to doing something else. > Similarly, I understand the mimetic quality of '[str]' for 'array of str' It's quite Haskell-like. > but '{str, int}' doesn't have the same ring since key/value pairs are separated by ':'. Indeed. `{str:int}` would be better.