There's a lot of folk workarounds for this problem. They're mostly fine for languages that use ASCII lightly. But it'd be a pretty confusing mess if we applied the "pick something in the jargon file" approach to something like the Hoon syntax.

Everyone who's learned our ASCII dictionary, which admittedly is not a whole lot of people, applies it compulsively.

Is the list in the whitepaper correct? It shows in part:

  nap [
  pan ]
  lep (
  pel }

If that's not a typo, using mirrored words for ( and } is downright malicious.

Doh! That serves me right for tweaking these right before shipping the whitepaper. Yes, "pel" is ).

but isn't pel a rip ?