[txbuck]

(Hot damn, that was a super thorough/thoughtful reply in a short amount of time.)

You're spot on about the quirky syntax, but I don't think it's as serious a trade-off or addition in complexity (or even a change), given that:

- (IIRC) many style-guides/formatters already enforce spaces between binary operators and their operands (but especially identifiers) and in my super-subjectively-opinionated opinion you should already be doing that even without a formatter

- I don't feel particularly strongly one way or another about any other special characters like "+", so really in this case I'm only considering the dash

- Requiring the dash be between alpha/alphanumerics makes it play nice with unary operators

- The language would be terrible for code-golfing, but that's a relatively niche application I'd definitely consider worth spurning