Hey, thanks for the reply. The discussion has been centred on explaining why you have to type the spaces, but I never really cared about that -- my problem was with reading. That's my fault, the usual complaint about whitespace sensitivity is about having to type it, and this is different. I'm talking mixed kebab-idents and really any math operators in the same expression. Unrealistic example but: `(n-1 + n-2) / (n-1 - n-2)`. We may naturally differ on that through familiarity, but it really does get my brain stuck. It doesn't surprise me at all that the mechanics of adding spaces were so easy to learn, but I'm not totally convinced you would have received explicit feedback on readability from students who don't have much to compare to. On the flipside, if you don't get feedback on reading tricky numeric expressions, then they don't care, it doesn't come up for beginners as they're not optimising sqrt routines, and it doesn't matter to a language made for them. I think that's the end of the road.
On the binops, it may be that forcing whitespace around them is a good idea even for a language without kebab-idents, and perhaps the risk you took there was worth it to find that out. I could get around a world in which C's `a & b` and `&ptr` were completely incompatible. (I'm sure you could find a CVE or two for that one.) Heck, every code formatter out there does it. Compared to some suggestions around here and apparently back in 2013 as well to ditch BODMAS, the one bit of math that everyone on the planet learns in school, in favour of whitespace-sensitive precedence... goodness me. Give me forced spaces around binops any day.