[Joker_vD]

Well, when I played with a minimal lambda-calculus evaluator, I quickly got tired of having to print "\" or whatever to denote the start of a lambda. But look, for example, at this:

    (f. (x. f (v. x x v)) (x. f (v. x x v)))
        fct. n.
            (church0? n)
            (_. church1)
             _. church* n (fct (church- n 1))

Are "\" really needed there? You have to put lots parens to denote where lambdas end anyway, and they also happen to show where they start too, and a dot is a clear enough signal for a human (IMHO) to see that it's a lambda. So that's how I've came up with the idea of writing lambdas like that. Then I extended my lambda-calculus evaluator with some arithmetic primitives, and yes, the syntax got somewhat peculiar.