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PHP also uses -> and is still popular with those younger than 40. The lack of $ gives it away though. This is a very curious case indeed.

Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.

If I were making paper notes, I would not bother with exact syntax - especially not for tokens which only exist for the machine parser's sake.

In other words, I have written PHP pseudocode which definitely omits $. But these notes are generic enough to allow virtually anything C-descended.