[Ygg2]

1) Sure, pair symbols are a bit rare. But they aren't as rare as you set them to be. Symbols like / | or \ can act as substitute for bracket like syntax.

    > If we look at languages which did away with 
      this made-up difference we see that pretty much no  
      person is missing  it.

Eh, not sure what languages are these and how you think they relate to Rust. Keep in mind Rust goal almost from the start was something that is familiar to a people that worked with Gecko engine. With that in mind, I can't think of a similar family language that did this.

You know what happens when you call Index/IndexMut. To say it isn't so, is outright fallacious.

Also Rust takes the probably best road of allowing limited operator overload, which IMO so far proved better than allowing no operator overload or allowing custom operator overload - which is subject to weird rules and/or leads to heavily overloaded code.

Also [] always does same thing. For given Index value it returns value found at that index. & is not an address. AFAIK address are never allowed unless you drop into unsafe. It's a borrow reference to Output value. Index returns immutable version, while IndexMut takes mutable version and returns mutable output value.

2) No we don't. I think having user and built-in defined types is perfectly ok. In any non-Lispy langugage there are special literals, which can't be handled by user defined ways, unless you allow for some funky grammar.

4) Related yes, same no. In same way i32 and u32 are related but not the same. As I said in previous question having some subset of language be unable to modify is IMHO a good thing.

6/7) They can't. You can tell by mutability of array which one will be called and which one will be returned. You CAN'T EVER change type of mutability of result.

9) Whenever I see macros/operator overload/syntax being given too much freedom, it always ends up with incomprehensible DSL-s that you can't disentangle from regular code.

10) Subjective opinion. And it could be trivially solved with better type aliases.

12) I don't think it's a big problem and a fix to Cargo that adds a special unique identifier should be trivial to implement, although not necessarily forward/backward compatible.

[Ygg2]

What multiple Rust proponents? Where? What people consider [] superior to <>? How many?

Your text have an air of superiority but your arguments leave a lot to be desired or to be more frank [Citation needed].

[Ygg2]

    > Nobody claims that <> isn't "familiar". People are claiming
    > that <> isn't very good, and they are correct with that.
    > Those languages which made <> "familiar" picked <> because
    > they added templates/generics/... after the fact and tried
    > to bolt them onto an existing language without breaking all
    > existing code.   

What people are claiming this? Is there some argument

     <Type, <Type<Type>>> 

is much better than

     [Type, [Type[Type]]]

in monospaced fonts? I agree I prefer it, but I know it comes down to subjectivity and familiarity. Not the most compelling reasons.

  >      impl Index<usize> for MyFunnyArray {
               type Output = u32;
               fn index<'a>(&self, _index: usize) -> &u32 {
                   &self.arr[random::<usize>() % 3]
               }
           }

           impl IndexMut<usize> for MyFunnyArray {
               fn index_mut<'a>(&'a mut self, _index: usize) -> &'a mut u32 {
                   self.arr[random::<usize>() % 3] = random();
                   &mut self.arr[random::<usize>() % 3]
               }
           }

Sure, you can write that, but you can also write:

      fn getIndex(&self, index: usize) {
           self.arr[random::<usize>()%self.arr.length]
      }

Rust won't protect you from stupid mistakes. The only question is whether it will allow you to override index syntax.

      myArray[3]
      myArray.getIndex(3) 

I actually prefer this small token of power, as opposed to having to write:

     date1.compareTo(date2) < 0
     date1.equalsTo(date2)
     date1.index(at)

That gets tedious fast.

     > As you might see, they are called i32 and u32, not i32 and UnsignedInt4Bytes.

Correct, because they are both built in literals. String isn't a built in literal. You can't have:

      u32::new()



     >Not sure what you suddenly try so say with "you can't
     >modify this", "you can't mutate that".

     >As shown in 1) [] can do whatever the developer implements.
     >Sure, the usual language rules apply, I think nobody 
     >disagreed on that.

No matter how many time you call Index on your array it stays the same. What kind of trippy Index you want to implement is still there, only with uglier syntax.

      > Yes, that's exactly the concern I'm raising here, because that's what Rust is encouraging.

It's not. All macro invocations are fenced in by macro calls. All syntax extensions are followed by extension calls. Could macros/syntax extensions do horrible things? Sure. So can regular code.