Casting by assigning to the right ...

[Manfred Nowak]

On Wednesday, 15 April 2020 at 12:30:43 UTC, aliak wrote:
> Yes, but I'm not sure what the legality of syntax has to do
> with readability/maintainability/etc?
That depends ... When character sequences, legal in a programming 
language, are causing disgust, then that language might have a 
design flaw not detectable by their _usual_ users.

> Elm recently (well, last year or two was it?) did away with 
> allowing cryptic operators [...]
On the other hand there still is seed7-lang 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed7) claiming, that in addition 
to operators the whole syntax is under control of the coder.

The root of failing to detect intention stems from structuring 
and partly hiding data. Structuring raises the need to somehow 
access the data stored within the structure, mainly done by 
qualifying the identifiers `s.i'. Partly hiding then raises the 
need to access the data via _other_ qualified identifiers, which 
are not hidden like `s.isNull', `s.nullify', `s.set( val)' ...

Of course using any of those newly introduced identifiers 
implicitly calls a function, whose outcome the coder has to know; 
otherwise the coder is unable to implement his own intentions.

Answers this enough of your question I cited at the beginning of 
this post?