Worse, I see C (as in ! or &&), and Perl (as in manifestly more than one way to do it).

There are real improvements though, such as ?. and ??= that help with default-nullable everything.

Ternary is very useful, but it I'd rather see it implemented idiomatically:

  pos += (if forward then +1 else -1)

Structural pattern-matching could be fantastic, but no syntax is suggested.