yeah that's why CGI::Carp translates -> to -» and so on, which makes some dumps hard to read.

My preference to <...> over [...] stems from the fact that square brackets are easily confused as array syntax by the eye.

I'd suggest to either double or invert the angle brackets, I doubt that <<...>> or >...< are easily confused as HTML tags.

update

I was wrong with the simple doubling, this <<br>> would be a a break surrounded by angles.

Though this might help ->...<-

I'm open for other ASCII suggestions, i.e. avoiding unicode.