[zerker2000]

Ah, I see ILang deals with the issue by… not having a name binding primitive, making you SKI-calculus your arguments into place. (Compare the piles of roll-swap-dup you get in varless forth dialects, though not as bad due to there being two directions args are passed in from.)

I suspect there is room here for an unprincipled "preceding word/pattern is defined by the following line/s" loose-binding operator, to restore skimability, and a separate inline destructuring let form that cannot leak out of lexical scope. Which I suppose would warrant lambdas - perhaps with ⍺ ⍺⍺ ⍺⍺⍺ to denote enclosing function input, rather than argument/operand/hyperand, though nonconcrete functions would stress the type system as is

[mlochbaum]

It does have : for assignment, although there's no scoping, and you have to assign to symbols that are surrounded in single quotes. You can see some examples at https://github.com/mlochbaum/ILanguage/blob/master/examples/... . They need extra parens, since : is an ordinary function and has the symbol on the left. Your overall point is right; I didn't really try to address any issues with assignment. And of course there are lots of things to try, and I hope some of them make it into some other language I design!