[k__]

This is interesting, especially for a language like Nim that favours familiarity with Python.

Even Rust dropped most of its strange operators/sigils early on in the experimentation phase, because they confused people and Rust doesn't step back from confusing people lightly, haha.

[elcritch]

Probably because Rust already has too many ascii symbols! ;) I still get brain mush remapping Rust's & from C's &.

But yah Nim's % is a bit strange at first, but becomes fairly handy in practice when dealing with lots a small bits of JSON. There's the % "to json" operator that mimics the $ "to string" operator for a single value. Then %* was added to handle multiple json items (I read it like apply % to all items). So it has a decent symmetry. Other than % and $ ascii operators are pretty rare in Nim code. Even bitops use or, and, shl, shr, etc over ascii operators.