Hyphens and question marks in identifiers is actually the biggest feature I wish other languages would steal from Lisp. It does help that lisp doesn’t suffer from the “is it an infix operator?” parsing problem, which exists for both programmatic and meat-based compilers.

Then you'd love FORTH. Why limit yourself to hyphens and question marks? The only character you can't use in a FORTH identifier is space.

    FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE FORTH LEARN THEN

    : C(-; LICK SMILE NOSE WINK ;

    \ FORTH PAPER TAPE PUNCHER:

    : PT# ( L --- L/2 )
      DUP 1 AND IF 
        ASCII @ 
      ELSE BL THEN
      HOLD
      2/
    ;

    : PT. ( N --- )
      <# PT# PT# PT# 
         ASCII . HOLD
         PT# PT# PT# PT#
      #> TYPE
    ;

    : CUT
      ." -----------" CR
    ;

    : PTAPE
      CUT
      BEGIN
        KEY ?DUP WHILE
        DUP ." |" PT. ." |"  SPACE EMIT CR
      REPEAT
      CUT
    ;

> I remember when this was switched on. Larry Wall tried it out on the entire spectest suite, and nothing broke (or at most one random thing broke), because basically people already put whitespace around their infix operators.

Larry Wall seems hilariously easy-going for a language BDFL!

He's a linguist and a self-professed post-modernist. He's interested in how people actually use language, and has very little interest in dictating language purity.

Larry Wall is to Linguistics as Deepak Chopra is to Quantum Physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

"While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the United States, where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished graduate school."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_imperialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilizing_mission

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo

> I remember when this was switched on [...] and nothing broke (or at most one random thing broke), because basically people already put whitespace around their infix operators

So you are saying that code like a=b-c+d completely changed its meaning? Would this example become a = b-c + d or a = b-c+d or a=b-c + d or ...?

I just can't imagine how you would change an existing language to such an extent.

The oddest lesson of Perl is that, even though there’s a million ways to do it, not all of them are used. It turns out that coders generally realize that the constructed examples you show above are all problematic for reasons unrelated to the change!

“What is b-c, is that a variable or a math?”

“Is it (a=b-c)+d or a=(b-c+d)”

So you simply wouldn’t encounter code written like this, because it’s just as confusing as it is problematic for the hyphen change.