It's nice to have very common features be syntactically lightweight, and sigils are incredibly lightweight compared to two-or-three character keywords. Rust cod

It's nice to have very common features be syntactically lightweight, and sigils are incredibly lightweight compared to two-or-three character keywords. Rust code uses these pointers in all but the most trivial code, so they'll be showing up a lot; in contrast, I suspect as a non-C# programmer that ref and out are not as widely used in most C# codebases as ~ and & are in Rust. There are also not that many sigils, all told—three sigils for pointers plus a few other operators that appear in this table. Additionally, this table is different from the tables of Scala dispatch operators, Perl operators, &c because of its regularity—it has two axes and a good deal of the information presented is a straightforward function of a cell's position in the table[1]. For example, the entry in the Owned column and the String row is going to be an... owned string, which is going to be prefixed with ~ (like every cell in the Owned column) and have a base type of str (like every cell in the String row). This is a far cry from the table of Scala's dispatch operators, in which there's no consistent indication of what a given operator will necessarily do aside from a general grouping of like operators. [^1, edit]: That isn't to say that ALL the information is a (predictable) function of a cell's position in the table. Some of that irregularity comes from arguably expected consequences of Rust semantics (e.g. of course you can't have a bare string, because you can only have bare values whose sizes are known in advance, and you don't know how long a string will be) while some is genuinely arbitrary, like the syntactic sugar for functions.