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We couldn't use `:` as that one is already used for too many things.

We then experimented with different tokens, and `/` felt best.

Wadler’s law or not, I’m not criticising, just curious :) Thank you (and 'EricCorry in sibling comment) for taking the time to answer!

[Yes, colons are nice as block introducers but don’t play nice with colons for type ascription, which is where we got Python’s asinine f(x: int, y: bool) -> str; don’t know why Rust went with that instead of ML’s uniform f(x: int, y bool): str.]

Answers from the implementors, awesome!

It’s also used in Elixir and Erlang for arity, but now that I think about it, it’s probably descended directly from Prolog.

Part of it is that we already used colon for several things.

Also types are optional in Toit, so they are a bit like comments (though they are now checked so they are less like comments now). So they look a little like // comments.