On 11/13/2012 12:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
An insightful talk by Guy Steele on what makes a language successful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Guy says something interesting in there that's applicable to one of our current
discussions.
Particularly, should we allow:
@identifier
as a user-defined attribute, in potential conflict with future reserved
attribute words, or not?
Guy makes the argument that users need to be able to extend the vocabulary of a
language and have those new words look like built-in ones. We have that today,
of course, with the ability of defining new types. There is no special syntax
that says "this is a user-defined type, not a keyword."
I think this is a compelling argument, and tips the scales in its favor.
Probably we've been excessively worried about the problems of adding a new
builtin attribute type.
