[maccam94]

Rust references are basically pointers with extra rules, so using a different symbol is reasonable, and rust is immutable by default rather than opt-in (which is an important design decision) so you have to have syntax to mark things as mutable. auto is horribly uninformative for new coders, and var is too overloaded to expect newbies to only use it for mutable variables.

[WalterBright]

D doesn't use `var`.