On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 09:23:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Wednesday, November 07, 2012 10:13:47 Jonas Drewsen wrote:
My vote goes to @(a,b,c) and @a @b @c.
I never understood why some builtin storage class keywords
have @
in front of them (e.g. @property, @safe, @disable) and some
don't
(e.g. pure, nothrow).
IMHO the cleanest design would be to have builtins as plain
keywords (ie. no @ in front). And then @xxx is reserved for
UDA.
I understand that this would be a breaking change and not
likely
to happen - just want to know the reasoning behind it.
It mainly came down to not wanting to add new keywords. By
using @safe instead
of safe, safe could still be used as a variable or function or
whatnot. There
was some discussion of which should have @ on them on which not
(e.g. nothrow
vs @nothrow was debated), but the decision was fairly
arbitrary. If anything
though, had we not cared about breaking code or whether D
looked similar to
other languages, we probably would have made _all_ attributes
start with @
(including stuff like @public). It would have been wonderfully
consistent that
way, but it wasn't ultimately deemed a good idea.
So, basically, @ was introduced to avoid adding more keywords.
It certainly
makes sense to extend it for using with user defined
attributes, but that
wasn't really the original intention.
- Jonathan M Davis
I we were to allow for @foobar style UDA then "safe" would have
to be a reserved keyword somehow. Otherwise I do not know what
this would mean:
struct safe { }
@safe void foobar() { }
/Jonas
