liz: With regards to possible confusion, that's also possible in the ASCII world: e.g. atomic-inc-fetch($ok) versus atomic_int_fetch or atonic-inc-fetch.

So true! I guess we all have been through that: 0 or O? l or 1 or |? _ or -? I try to make this more bearable by choosing a suitable font: This works reasonably well with the limited set of glyphs in ASCII, but is a considerable challenge for Unicode.