On the form of programming language operators

The general consensus amongst programmers is that brevity is a good thing; language with a verbose, unwieldy syntax like FORTRAN and COBOL generally get criticised as being old-fashioned and clumsy.

It occurs to me that encoding a lot of meaning in a very terse syntax carries risks of its own. It is, after all, much easier to overlook (in, say, C, Perl, or whatever) a '!' operator than it is to overlook the SQL operator "NOT", even though both completely alter the meaning of the expression they're used in.