Fwiw I don’t think your parent is lying but I also don’t feel it’s really accurate. If you read https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html for example, there’s some references that imply this, but it’s not really that “less symbols” was a goal so much as it is a secondary effect of other choices. Graydon wanted a simpler language and that implies simpler syntax, not the other way around. Even the grammar bit isn't really about "symbol soup."
Early Rust had other sorts of things that a lot of folks would consider readability problems unrelated to symbols too: no keyword was allowed to be over five characters, so return was ret, continue was cont, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
