I've sometimes wondered why not make `-` whitespace dependent to resolve this one. Signed numbers store the sign bit in their representation, so enforcing the sign character to be in the same word also seems reasonable - and is there anyone who would mind actually having to put at least one space around binary arithmetic operators? We've all agreed that that's the sane way to write them by now, yes?

I'm one of those who would complain. I often write n+1 and n-1 without spaces. And I hate C for preventing space removal from expressions like:

  *z = *x / *y;
  addr = mask & &x;
  x + ++y;

Or ["5", "-", "2"] even