What if these were real, type-safe expressions in Java:

    2025 July 19   // → LocalDate  
    300M m/s       // → Velocity  
    1 to 10        // → Range<Int>  
    Schedule Alice Tues 3pm  // → CalendarEvent

That's the idea behind binding expressions — a compiler plugin I built to explore what it would mean if adjacency had operator semantics. It lets adjacent expressions bind based on their static types, forming new expressions through type-directed resolution.

Details here: https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/doc...

Sorry for this sounds absurd, but with diffusion language models, who generate text non-linearly (from the few that I get, they relate terms without a simpler order), I wonder if new syntactic ideas will come up.

Mathematica has Infix [0], which expresses the adjacency with a ~ (because Mathematica reserves pure blankspace for multiplication). But it works fine to do eg. `"hello"~StringJoin~" world"`; I was always surprised we could only have the predefined operators in many other languages and we couldn't define our own.

This seems like a great attempt. I would be worried about how much parsing and backtracking might be required to infer the infix precedence in a totally general system (like garden-path sentences[1]) or actually ambiguous parse trees (which is cured by adopting some rule like right precedence and parens, but what rule you pick makes some 'natural language' constructions work over others).

[0] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Infix.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Maybe with a Java string templates:

    var myDate = MAGIC"2025 July 19"

Congratulations, you reinvented yet another stack language.