I’ve sometimes thought that a reasonable alternate choice would be:

  f g = composition of f then g
  x.f = f applied to x
  x.f g h = in regular notation h(g(f(x))

Though slightly different precedence rules may be preferable.

I think the k in awk considered juxtaposition-as-string-concatenation to have been a mistake by the way.

Some other reasonable choices may be:

- disallowed syntax

- multiplication (which, for matrices, is a special case of function composition and application)

- inner join which can be seen a bit like function composition but for relations instead of functions

- sequencing (ie instead of ‘;’)