Hmmm... I found neither Stephane's original post nor Richard's response 
particularly provocative.

In fact, I have followed Richard's advice to its logical conclusion in 
the two languages I am currently implementing (Self/R and the 
Forth-like Final) - no literal syntax of any kind. Instead, I let the 
programmer drop any live object into the source text. So characters, 
numbers, strings and arrays (even blocks, actually!!) are no more 
special than polygonMorphs and sampledSounds.

This has a very high cost: source can only be viewed in the system 
itself and never exported as ASCII for pasting into emails or 
publishing in print magazines.

In Self, "4+5*6" generates complaint about a syntax error. You *must* 
use parenthesis for this to compile. The exception to the "ambiguous 
binary selectors" rule is when the same selector is used multiple times 
as in "4+5+6", though I could live without this small convenience.

-- Jecel