[theseoafs]

> I mean... you could have just called it a ref. ref T instead of &T. And then just ref(foo) or foo.ref to get a ref to foo.

Ugh, no. There are references all over the place when I write Rust code -- it would be a serious bummer for me if annotating those types and making those references took up 4 characters for "ref " instead of just the 1 for &.

[zanny]

You can have both, but you use a lot of vocabulary all the time in rust (clone, let, mut, static) and nobody is harping on how the most common words need to be made glyphs to save 2-3 characters per use.