I was going to say "isn't Munificent still around?" :D

I wonder if you could make a "syntax v2" kind of thing, so it's a totally new syntax that you opt into (e.g. by a pragma at the top of files, or globally) that gets converted into the same IR.

Probably only worth doing once though to fix all of those things. And as you say, that's a ton of work for marginal benefit.

We talked about that many times over the years. It's not totally off the table, but it's a hard sell. It would effectively invalidate every existing blog post, StackOverflow answer, LLM, etc. that has been written for or trained on the old syntax.

The benefit would be real, but probably not large enough to outweigh that cost.

Path dependence rules everything.