AFAICT they only need to be written like that if you want to assign them to an implicitly typed variable or you can use the alternate explicitly-typed form (whi

AFAICT they only need to be written like that if you want to assign them to an implicitly typed variable or you can use the alternate explicitly-typed form (which the guide also shows): let x: int = 5; As far as i being an unfortunate suffix, I can't think of a better one when you consider there is already a pattern to such suffixes (being the first letter of the type) carried over from C/C++, et al. I suspect mathematician programmers who are already used to * being multiply and ^ being bitwise xor (instead of, say, an exponent operation) can probably learn to deal with it, or just avoid it by avoiding implicit typing for ints.