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Comment by codesections | Hacker News Reader

> Why change closures from || to //? (You’ve then reused | for other things, but why not the other way round?)

Just guessing, but I bet it's to create a parallelism between // (closure) and \\ (closure that moves). If closures were ||, there wouldn't be quite as much of a same-but-different feeling as you get with slash & backslash.

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As someone who thinks they probably have dyslexia the difference between slash and backslash is very hard for me to tell, but easy to differentiate from pipe. (One is straight the others are slanted, who knows which slant is which)

I'm not sure that's a dyslexia-specific thing. Back when the web started getting mainstream traction and it was notable to see URLs in TV commercials (ca 1994–5), I remember roughly half of the radio ads that mentioned URLs would say, “h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash…”

I think that's just because people couldn't remember which was "slash" and which was "backslash", and in the DOS/Windows world, you were more likely to hear references to "backslash". Browsers quickly started silently fixing inappropriate backslashes, so people never had to learn which was which.

I have a really hard time transcribing phone numbers and entering product serial keys too

Thank you for your input. The syntax should accommodate dyslexic learners as much as possible.

If anything in the syntax has ambiguity in this regard, please do share, as I am not dyslexic.

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