As has been said earlier, it's very unpractical to change the font of every website, every editor, every email client, every IM, and so on, just to have the closeness not be a problem. Eyesight doesn't even come into it for me at this point :)

And those examples you posted can be very problematic. They are exactly the cases why you need a good programming font that dashes the 0, gives "," bigger mass, and uses clever serifs. And I'd feel like this would just add another case. Maybe I read too much prose with inline code that isn't monospaced (and that I can easily slap my font on).

I can see your point about the mental "points to" equivalency. I guess the "standing out like a sore thumb" is actually what I like about it. In my head "?->" reads as "(if possible (do what -> does))". So my mind basically wraps the "?" around the "->" (which is why I'd prefer the prefixed version over a postfixed one). And I'd like my brain to have it easy enough to always do that expansion quickly. It being a three-char operator helps me with that.

Too bad we don't have something like a double-squiggly line in ASCII. That might be a good middle-ground.