[throwawaymaths]

the line noise is really ~only there for dangerous stuff, where slowing down a little bit (both reading and writing) is probably a good idea.

as for the dots, if you use zig quite a bit you'll see that dot usage is incredibly consistent, and not having the dots will feel wrong, not just in an "I'm used to it sense/stockholm syndrome" but you will feel for example that C is wrong for not having them.

for example, the use of dot to signify "anonymous" for a struct literal. why doesn't C have this? the compiler must make a "contentious" choice if something is a block or a literal. by contentious i mean the compiler knows what its doing but a quick edit might easily make you do something unexpected