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One of the design-philosophy things, for lack of a better description, is the now-upsoken desire for what I think of as excess automaticity; to have the code in this instance the debugger, SID, figure out your intent from context; for example, SID's symbol handling.

In DDT or SID, to continue execution from current PC to some place you want to place a breakpoint at 5678h, the syntax is

$ G,5678

Using SID with symbols, and assuming symbol name FOOBAR has a value of 5678, SID requires:

$ G,.FOOBAR

The leading dot explicitly says "characters following are symbol name" (and not digits).

The excess automaticity, lol in this example pretty trivial! is to make SID smart enough to discern a hex number from a symbol name. We've all coded such things and dealt with all the common issues ("symbols cannot start with a digit", allowed delimiter lists, complex parsers, feedback, etc) when simply requiring a dot reduces the CLI parser to a trivial act (as does, no extra spaces allowed! No trailing spaces! No variable arguments!)

There can be elegance but it's restricted and quite limited -- but the binaries can be *tiny* and frugality is primary in a 16-bit address system!

Modern practices are a hard habit to break. And spare elegance is hard, and avoiding creeping featuritis is hard!

And CP/M sysbol tables are never large; so error rates hardly matter, and corrupted symbol tables (usually external file-smashing and human practices) are fixed by simply recompiling, Nothing is ever large enoug to worry about,