Hi people and thanks for weighing in. It's nice to note that there's already a DIP on this. I hope it's refined and implemented in a future version in a meaningful manner. Is it OK to edit the wiki to add one's opinions?
And in this case, personally I'm not sure why people are talking about code *breakage*, which is a big word IMO. It's after all removing or adding @ in a few cases. It's relatively straightforward a fix to automate. If there can be a dfix to relocate the const from before to after the function name, then this should be much easier, no? It wouldn't even need a D3, but could be done in a future D2 point release. And as someone else said, there's a difference between outright breakage and planned deprecation. As for the cases when serious changes to the grammar are needed, I feel the Py2 to Py3 transition is a good example to emulate. Lots of cleanup happened in Py3, Py2 is still supported, and there exists tools like 2to3 and six (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/six) to help people bridge the gap. Finally in general I'd also like to suggest that rather than saying something like "you won't be able to convince Walter of this because it's not important", which IMHO tends to somewhat put off newbies who are excited by the language and want to contribute, and tends to put the project masters in an autocratic light (which people won't like to hear), one might consider saying something like "D 2 is now aiming for stability so we are trying to minimize the number of grammar changes". Thanks again, all! -- Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा