I completely disagree. I could not disagree more. A pair of readable words, words that of different lengths so are easily distinguishable without reading them

I completely disagree. I could not disagree more. A pair of readable words, words that of different lengths so are easily distinguishable without reading them characer-by-character, are far more legible than a pair of line-noise characters -- especially if those characters on their own have wildly different meanings in the language, and -- to make matters even worse -- are also extremely close to the characters for code comments! Look, to spell this out: You have your own opinion and that is fine. You are perfectly entitled to it. But you are making out that your preference is some global truth, and I think you need to realise that what is easier or clearer for you is in fact less clear and much LESS readable for other people. Those words were chosen for good reasons and have persisted through whole generations of programming languages for something like half a century, and there are good reasons for this. The C designers chose things shorter and easier to type and that is their privilege. I personally, and thousands of others, dislike their choice and prefer Wirth's. Nobody is absolutely objectively right or wrong here. The point is that there are good reasons for both choices, and nobody -- including me -- gets to go and say one is better and clearer and the other is worse. What you like, I hate. What I like, you hate. But we both have our reasons. I think mine are good reasons. Presumably you think yours are, although you haven't explained them. You just assert them as obvious global truths. They are not.