> in practice the closure syntax and logical or do not lead to confusion (imho, ymmv).

That's true. But put your self in the mind of a C developer looking at Rust code for the first time:

     if a || b {
       println!("True");
     }

Cool.

Then:

     thread::spawn(|| println!("Hello from a thread!"););

What? What is the logical or doing there?

----

IIRC, there are also cases where you have to write `& &` instead of `&&` to not confuse the compiler. That's a design/practical issue.

Both those issues would have been avoided if literal `and`/`or` were used.

I find it interesting how the only thing that momentarily confused me, as a C developer, about Rust syntax, was caused by Rust authors not wanting to syntactically deviate too much from C.