We can blame Lukas Smith, and all who voted for it, which link I cannot find right now.
Also see this.
To me, I see it as a failure of imagination. There are definitely other characters they could have evaluated.
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A few that come to mind are: the pipeline character (|), or the exclamation mark (!). And what about the hash character (#)?
cu, w0lf.
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Exactly. Anything that did not have to be escaped when in a string literal.
I dislike the convention of \ for namespaces as much as anyone, but from what I recall, any other character would have been much more difficult to implement into the parser, with at least some incompatibilities with existing code. The most obvious case of this is # which indicates a comment.
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