[xlnt]

I agree with you that !, &&, || aren't the best idea ever. I wonder if the reason behind them over words is so you don't have to put spaces around them. Omitting spaces seems to be popular with the infix crowd (e.g., they happily give up *,+,- from identifiers just to leave out some spaces).

[raganwald]

"I wonder if the reason behind them over words is so you don't have to put spaces around them."

Hunh, that hadn't occurred to me! That's a really interesting conjecture, touching on design trade-offs in neat ways. Thanks!