[Araq]

I agree that 'discard' is usually a code smell, but how would implicitly ignoring the result be any better? It wouldn't be better at all, and that means Nim's discard feature is rather well designed as it improves the status quo.

[mlthoughts2018]

Why is implicitly ignoring the result the option you’re comparing with? Instead, create language features that encourage you to separate side-effectful functions from value-returning ones.

Also many languages use a very standard convention of assigning underscore to parts of a result value to be ignored, and discard has no clear advantages over this in my mind.