It would work, and the value would still be 10. I suggest not characterizing this as "allowing operators in variable names" any more than you'd call it "allowi

It would work, and the value would still be 10. I suggest not characterizing this as "allowing operators in variable names" any more than you'd call it "allowing keywords in variable names" that in most languages you can have variables called "life", "athena", "door_count" and "ended" even if "if", "then", "do" and "end" are keywords. (Does C "allow operators in other operators" because it has both "+" and "++"?) Rather: in Dylan, more characters than in (say) C are treated as ordinary constituent-of-identifier characters, with the consequences that (1) you can have things like hyphens in your names and (2) you more often have to use actual whitespace to delimit operators. ("shoe-size := shoe - size".) This is traditional in Lispy languages, in most of which #2 isn't much of a drawback anyway because of the prefix syntax (in C you can say "a=b-c" if compactness is important to you, but obviously you're not going to write "=a-bc" in a prefix language or "bc-a=" in a postfix one). Dylan is unusual in preferring #1 over #2 despite using infix syntax.