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It‘s not a lie, it‘s a loose quote of Steve Klabnik when I asked him on Reddit

• steveklabnik 2y ago
  Ha! Well maybe my opinion has changed over time. To be honest, I struggle to call Rust “symbol soup” now or then; other than lifetimes, which is just one symbol, I don’t think Rust is a particularly symbol heavy language, or at least, not much more than any other curly brace and semicolon language.
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    Well, if you can have (and projects do have) >5 consecutive symbols, then it is symbol heavy. I am pretty sure I made this comment a long time ago with an example but paging on HN is dreadful and time-consuming. I will try to look for it. It was on GitHub. I came across it when I was interested in Rust and checked somewhat popular Rust codebases. Can you think of such cases?
    • steveklabnik 2y ago
      I think it also depends on how you think of symbols; I see "::" as a single operator, not two symbols. Do () and <> count as individual symbols? I believe you do, given that you have an example upthread. If those are the case, well, I can construct something, but it's not something I've used directly. Four isn't unheard of if you're going by those rules, but five is a bit extra. You cited )?)?; a little while ago, I personally would write this code like the final example over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234284
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        Yes, I consider "::" as two symbols, also yeah I am against ")?)?" but I have seen "worse" in the wild. I think I will have to look for what I saw before we continue. I might not be able to reply to this comment, however.