Tangentially there is room for optimizing for non-american keyboards.

The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. For your example I had to type `, but then look ahead to the a of add_numbers and remember to put in an extra space, so that the ` and the "a" don't combine to an "à".

Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it.

Curly or square brackets, backslashes and other stuff also put you into uncomfortable AltGr or Cmd-Shift territory on some keyboards. American language designers are often blind for these simple ergonomics.

> The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. … Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it.

I understand that keyboards behave as they behave, and saying that "well they shouldn't" isn't a real answer. But I also think that it's not true that the backtick character is an accent grave, even if it is treated like one, any more than any other pair of Unicode homoglyphs are the same.