I designed the lifetime syntax and I'm far from having a pure math background. There aren't any sigils in Rust that C doesn't have, other than the lifetime syntax, which needs separate syntax as it's a novel feature.
Can you name a specific feature you want removed from Rust?
I'm not sure I'd want it removed, but generics tend to be pretty horrific looking to people new to the language.
An example:
fn largest<T>(list: &[T]) -> T {
let mut largest = list[0];
for &item in list.iter() {
if item > largest {
largest = item;
}
}
You need to specify the properties of T that you use. So, that first line should be:
fn largest<T: PartialOrd + Copy>(list: &[T]) -> T {
IMHO Rust may have tried to roll a little too much into the language. It has the air of the second system effect to it, where every good idea from every language is added together to get something that is less than the sum of its parts and you get code that is hard to decipher until you've learned a full college course worth of syntax.