Oh, I know where it came from. That's also why we have all kinds of maths operators in the syntax of virtually any programming language. Because back when we didn't yet know where this programming thing was going, we just threw in the conventions of maths and theoretical logic.

What I'm saying is that we have our own conventions now, i.e. objects and methods, so I think, it's worth reconsidering whether we still want to have these old conventions that are special cases in the syntax.