Definitely concur. In a well designed language, I'd expect it to be possible to express something a bit closer to C++'s ios but without the crazy verbosity, and without switching mode. It's not that general language features like this aren't possible, it's often that they simply haven't been discovered yet. User-defined literals are a recent concept that helps eliminate some crap in a related area.

Meanwhile, can't complain all that much if zero-cost features can be added to Rust to make it easier to market it to scripting folk. I think that can only be a good thing, even if the feature design is far from ideal.