I can see that you’ve never designed a language. The design and implementation of Rust took many years. Over that time people’s ideas and priorities changed. Ev

I can see that you’ve never designed a language. The design and implementation of Rust took many years. Over that time people’s ideas and priorities changed. Even the people changed. In the early days of the language design sigils were very heavily used throughout the language. Even the language keywords were deliberately shortened as much as possible (consider ”fn“ and ”ret“, for example). Most of the sigils were eventually replaced with traits, but not all of them. ”!“ is one that survived.